Hundred upon hundreds of pebbles clattered off the pillars, hundreds more fell short into the crowd, though harmlessly. It was what I imaged a battlefield must be like, confusion, chaos, deafening noise, hails of randomly flying missiles; immersion in a kind of video game simulation of Armageddon.
Yet it also had the feel of some care-free mass sport, many people laughing and grinning as they threw their stones, others red-faced and screaming, milling around to gain advantage, and all of it directed not at any human enemies but at the silent unmoved and unmoving representatives of Satan.
Hamza immediately fell into the spirit of the thing, grinning wildly, shouting something I could not hear over the roaring voice of the crowd, dragging me forward through it to get within range, and I was soon overwhelmed by it all myself, howling I knew not what, subsumed into the mass frenzy, like one more mindless pirhana in a ravening school, like one more cell in the body of a great white organism with a single focused purpose.
One was supposed to score seven hits, no more, no less, on the stone body of Satan, but everyone came with plenty of ammunition.
Hamza dragged me toward one of the pillars through the mob, people shouting and screaming all around us, pebbles falling short and glancing off of us, until we reached what was sufficiently closer range at least for him in his excitement, and he began throwing pebbles, more of them than not falling short, a few hitting their mark.
“Like machine gun fire!” he shouted directly into my ear. “Forget about accuracy! Let them have it! Don’t worry, they’re not firing back!”
I tried a few shots myself, but they all fell short, and I found myself dragging him forward. I say I found myself doing this, but in truth my self was quite lost as I became one more soldier in this army of hadjis pelting the pillar, one more warrior in the united body of Islam, the white-clad army of the Light bombarding the stone-cold icon of the devil, the implacable façade of the Great Satan. Of Fortress America.
“Allahu Akbar!”
“Death to Satan!”
“Death to the Great Satan!”
“Death to America!
This was what they were all shouting, and so was I as I hurled my stones against the rock behind which the infidels of the world sheltered, my soul transported to another time and place—the final battle at the end of the world between the minions of Satan and Allah’s Army of the Faithful.
And Allah spoke to me with this vision resolving all doubt. This was the Jihad that had begun when He had created the world and time and which would be won or lost only when both ended. Good and Evil shorn of all their worldly forms must fight to the death of the one or the other like a lion against a tiger. Like water against fire. There could be no neutrals in this Holy War for this was the battle for the fate of all Creation.
A man did not have to hate the enemy to fight in this battle, no more than the tiger hated the lion or water hated fire. This was the nature of all things and nothing could choose not to take part in it. This was the Jihad for the salvation of the soul of the world or its destruction.
The only choice was which side to be on.
For Islam or against it.
“Death to the darkness!” I shouted. “Death to Satan! Death to the Great Satan!”
It might be said that the decision had been made for me by Allah when I was born a Muslim. But Allah had granted me the choice to surrender to His Will or not as He did for all of his creatures. One might be favored to be born a Muslim. Or not. But born Muslim or Infidel, one must choose to fully surrender to the Will of Allah to truly embrace Islam.
As I did now.
The stoning of the pillars of Satan marked the formal end of the Hadj. The Hadj was a journey and this was its collective destination. And now the hadj of my singular soul was also completed.
For I understood and accepted what Allah had made me and for what purpose.
I was a jihadi. I was Osama His Gun. His weapon to wield as He would.
It seemed that Hamza had to drag me again, out of the Jamarat, out of the vision, for I remember nothing until we were well outside both.
He nodded at me. It was a question.
I nodded back. It was my answer. The only answer I could make.
I would fight on whatever battlefield Allah granted me by whatever means He placed in my hands.
“Osama the Gun will fight in Nigeria. For those who are not with us are against us.”
CHAPTER 24
The Hadj was over and so too my personal hadj to what I now knew Allah had willed me to become, but there was still the traditional three days of feasting afterward in Mina, and the matter of escaping from the Caliphate to Nigeria. I had that rare treasure, a Caliphate passport, but the exit visa on it was for one time only, and I would need another. These were not granted lightly, and not without a thorough passing of the application through the records, which would reveal me as the Caliphate agent who had become Osama the Gun and whose lips were better off permanently sealed. I was trapped as a fugitive inside my own country. The country which had betrayed me and sought my death.
But when I explained my problem to Hamza during the first day of the feast at Mina, he laughed, and told me it would be no problem at all, but would say no more. And so I spent the second day of the feast saying distracted goodbys to our companions on the Hadj in less than a celebratory mood, and the only conversation that I remember was a peculiar one between Hamza and Gregory Mohammed over the last dinner I would spend in their company.
Once more the talk had drifted to the war in Nigeria, drawing my attention away from my dilemma and onto the field of battle I must overcome to join.
“Whatever I feel about your country, you are a soldier,” Hamza told Gregory. “And I ask you, one soldier to another, how can the American controllers, never risking their own lives in combat, never seeing the face of an enemy as we never see theirs, maintain any fighting spirit at all, pushing their buttons, looking into video screens, playing with their joysticks, never even taking to the air?”
Captain Mohammed threw up his hands.
“Don’t ask me, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re talking to one of the last fighter-jocks, my man. My kid’s in the Air Force, third generation, and what does he do? He sits in a room in Nebraska drinking Coca Cola, eating chocolate bars, playing with his pixel planes on the screen. They say he’s good at it, just got his first lieutenant’s bars, and he’s never even flown a trainer. Y’know, I could’ve made major, meaning retired on a lieutenant colonel’s pension, they offered me command of a whole bunker of these nerds if I’d re-up after my twentieth year.”
He shrugged. “Instead I got out with my major’s pension as a captain.”
“Because you are a soldier,” Hamza told him. “With a soldier’s honor.”
“Nice of you to think so,” Gregory said. “But the truth of it is when they took me out of the cockpit, that was the end of what I joined the Air Force for in the first place. You’d have to be a fighter pilot to understand, and there ain’t no more of us in the USAF anymore. We didn’t fly to fight, we fought to fly, and they took away all of our toys.”
“At least you know your son will not be slain in combat,” Hamza told him not unkindly. “And I know that I will never kill him.”
“Which doesn’t mean he might not kill you,” Gregory Mohammed said sardonically, “without even knowing that he did.”
There was an uncomfortable silence after that, and the talk quickly shied away onto more innocent matters, but I could not banish the shadow of it so easily. I had seen the face of the man in the souk when I pulled the trigger, before the check cashing agency I had killed two armed men who would have killed me. But when the grenades went off, I had killed many men, and no doubt women and children too, who would not have killed me, who, like Captain Mohammed’s son, I never even saw. His cause might be that of Satan and mine of Allah, but did that ma
ke it right?
I believed that it did. Yet I could not understand how.
* * * *
On the afternoon of the third day of the feast, Hamza came to me and told me to say my goodbyes and follow him. He led me to a bus where other men were already boarding, some three score of them, none of them looking older than thirty, none of whom I had met, none of whom were black.
He handed me a Nigerian passport in the name of “Hassan bin Abdullah.” “See you in Abuja, Inshallah, Captain,” he said by way of goodbye, and did not board the bus.
When it was fully loaded, it drove us off on the highway to Jedda. No one spoke, lost in our own thoughts, many reading the Koran, as did I, before reading in the moving vehicle began to make me carsick.
We were taken directly to the airport, to the military terminal, where an old Airbus 340 painted with the colors and emblems of something called “Sahel Airways” rested incongruously on the tarmac amidst a squadron of Caliphate Mirages in desert battle camouflage. Two other buses had already arrived and unloaded, two more were parking, and there was a line before the outdoor boarding ramp with two Caliphate soldiers flanking its foot, merely glancing at passports held up for their cursory inspection by those boarding. I joined the line and when it came my turn I did likewise. The soldier did not seem to even bother looking at it.
When I boarded the “Sahel Airways airliner” I entered another world. A military world. There was no first class or business class, only rows of seats crammed efficiently together. No galleys. The interior was painted a dull desert tan and the seats likewise upholstered. Even the vomit bag was military issue. The only “flight attendants” were two black soldiers wearing holstered pistols.
When the plane had taken on its load of something like two hundred and fifty men, the door was closed, the engines started, it taxied swiftly to a runway and immediately took off, without the customary announcements or reading of safety procedures.
It seemed as if I was already in the war zone before the landing gear was even retracted.
Cries of “Allahu Akbar!” filled the cabin as we climbed, turned, and headed southwest.
* * * *
It was a five hour flight to Abuja, the last half in darkness over Africa, no meal was served, and the only “inflight entertainment” was a fifteen minute video briefing on the war shown on the drop down screens which had not been removed when the A340 airliner was converted to a military transport.
There was a short clip of the speech by the so-called President of New Biafra declaring independence, another of the Nigerian President denouncing it, a third of the American President recognizing New Biafra.
“The first Nigerian offensive…” said the voice of the narrator.
A front of Nigerian tanks led a formation of armored personnel carriers and trucks across a grassy plain towards a ragged line of Biafran infantry dug in before them with a large unruly looking mob of troops deployed in no particular order behind it. The tanks opened fire, bombarding the Biafran rear, which broke and fled in disorder before the Nigerian armor even broke their front line.
“The cowardly dogs fled before us…”
And then I had my first look at the forces of the Great Satan. Six dull metallic cylinders as large as oil tankers and roughly shaped like ships suddenly breached through the surface of a placid blue sea.
“The American Whales in combat for the first time…”
The huge submarines opened up along their midlines like clam shells, revealing long flat decks crammed with planes too small to hold pilots. The planes soared up directly into the air as if shot from cannon, each submarine carrier launching at least a hundred of them.
“The American Falcons…”
Hundreds of these American drone aircraft appeared in the skies above the Nigerian army pursuing the now fleeing Biafrans. They began firing rockets down onto the Nigerian tanks and armored personnel carriers, several apiece. Some immediately found their marks and obliterated them before the tanks and armored personnel carriers could begin to take evasive action, zigging and zagging in frantic disarray back across the plain. It did them little good. The satanic rockets curved, zig-zagged with them, dropped down into low horizontal flight, each apparently locked onto a tank or personnel carrier, moving in for swift kills seemingly with wills of their own. Soldiers fled their vehicles every which way afoot. It was a terrible and terrifying slaughter.
“The aerial assault on Port Harcourt…”
A flight of Nigerian Super-Etendard fighter-bombers, some hundred of them, flew over swampy ground towards a large city on an estuary leading to the ocean and a network of off-shore oil well platforms, pumping stations, loading docks and pipelines. As they were approaching the city, the metal Whales of the Americans breached, opened their shells, quickly launched hundreds of even smaller flying drones, and just as quickly closed them and submerged.
“The American Wasps.”
The formation of Nigerian fighter-bombers flew directly at a cloud-wall of these evil things, like a flight of geese into a swarm of deadly stinging wasps. Each American Wasp dove directly at a Super-Etendard at blinding speed; in moments dozens of them were destroyed by small but crippling explosions.
The Nigerian fighters broke formation, each taking individual evasive action, looping, diving, climbing, and it broke down into scores of individual dog-fights in which the Nigerian planes were quite helpless. Outnumbered as they were, each of them found itself attacked by two or three or four of the Great Satan’s suicide machines, too small and swift to be targets for their missiles and guns, harrying and pursuing them no matter how they turned and climbed, and in a coordinated manner too, like packs of hounds.
Not a single Nigerian plane survived.
“The destruction of our Air Force…”
Three larger American drones appeared over Nigerian planes parked on an airfield. These were no more than jet engines hung on wings supporting frameworks holding long oval pods.
“The American Vultures…”
One of the Vultures soared low over the airfield, nozzles in the belly of its pod releasing a heavy grayish-white mist that drifted down to envelope it. Then it dropped a bomb into the chemical ground fog. It exploded in a ball of flame which ignited a far greater explosion. When the resulting cloud cleared, there was nothing to be seen of what had been a military airfield but a huge smoking crater littered with bits and pieces of metal debris.
A Nigerian officer appeared on the screen, a general to judge by all the brass and braid and medals. “This is how the enemy fights. The Americans, like invincible cowards before whom our armor is useless and our air power destroyed, their Christian Soldiers helpless cowards before the army of United Nigeria. But United Nigeria fights on!”
Nigerian infantry, dispersed into many small squads slogged through a grim swamp along a wide front towards Biafran soldiers crouched behind a mud breastwork. Biafran machine guns began firing before the Nigerians were in range. A bugle sounded. The Nigerians charged without firing. The Biafrans fired at them with lighter weapons, still out of range. When the Nigerians were within range, they fired away. The Biafrans fired back raggedly until the Nigerians were close upon them, then singularly, in small groups, then the whole troop of them, they broke and ran, scattering backwards, with individual Nigerian squads in hot pursuit.
A droning rumble approached swiftly from behind the Biafrans, and a moment later a cloud of American Falcons appeared in the sky above them. Another bugle sounded as the Falcons began firing their rockets. The Nigerians fled backwards towards whence they came in small groups, as individuals. Many were blown to bits by the rockets, but the hits seemed random, and even more escaped to melt away into the swamp.
The Nigerian general reappeared.
“United Nigeria fights on! The Americans may drive us back with their demonic robots but they fear to face Nigerian soldiers with their own
on our sacred soil and their Biafran Christian Soldiers will never hold an inch of ground against the forces of United Nigeria! This is the war as it is. A war with neither victory nor defeat. But this is the war as it will be!”
What next appeared on the screens was not combat footage but computer animation and not very good computer animation at that. Half a dozen soldiers in camouflage suits that could exist nowhere but in such a cartoon, causing them to blend into the swamp they were crawling through like chameleons, approached an oil pipeline, attached explosive charges, faded away. The charges exploded. Similar outline figures reached a pumping station undetected and blew it up. Another such squad easily destroyed an oil well. Several such squads infiltrated an outlined oil refinery which exploded in an immense ball of flame. Magically invisible men in magically invisible rubber boats destroyed an off-shore loading station and the tanker beside it.
It was about as realistic as the smuggled Hollywood cartoons I loved as a boy, but I found nothing to love in this, fearing that I knew all too well what was coming.
“The Great Satan cares for nothing but the oil,” the Nigerian general proclaimed. “Show the Americans that they cannot have it and they will be gone. This is how our victory will be won! And you, jihadis of Allah will bring us this victory! The glory will be yours! Long live United Nigeria! Death not oil to the Great Satan! Allahu Akbar!”
There were no answering cries of Allahu Akbar in the plane. There was a long silence and then mutterings and groanings of dismay, rising towards outrage.
I was sitting on the aisle. “They take us for fools,” said the man by the window. “I joined this jihad to fight for Islam, to die for Islam if Allah so wills it, but this is hopeless!”
“Take heart, brother,” the man between us told him in a near whisper. “I have heard that we are to be led by a man who will know how to make this work, and work well, for he has proven it before…in Paris!”
Osama the Gun Page 19
