Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  My testicles seemed to suck themselves back into my body even before he said it.

  “You don’t mean…?”

  “But I do,” the man said softly. And then he shouted it out so that the whole plane could hear.

  “We will be led by Osama the Gun!”

  “Osama the Gun…?”

  “Osama the Gun!”

  “Allahu Akbar!”

  “Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun!”

  Were this a Hollywood movie, no doubt my heart would be so bursting with pride that the hero of the hour would have arisen from his seat and delivered a noble and inspiring speech. As it was, this was no movie, and the best I could manage was to sit there immobily so that my despairing cringing would not be noticed.

  I was totally unprepared for such command. It was not my own life that I feared for, but theirs.

  “Osama the Gun! Allahu Akbar!”

  One of the two Nigerian soldiers shouted it too, and his face told me that it was as much a revelation to him as it was to me, though a far more joyous one.

  “Welcome to Nigeria!” cried the other soldier.

  And indeed I felt I was already there.

  * * * *

  We landed in Abuja in the dead of night, were loaded into buses and taken to a military barracks on the outskirts of the airport itself, so that I saw nothing more of the Nigerian capital. There we were fed chicken stewed in a spicy sauce over some kind of mush, and then left to our own devices on rows of canvas cots which were the only furnishings.

  It was late by then, everyone was groggy from the flight, and many soon fell asleep, but others, sleepy or not, fell to talking worriedly about what had been shown to us of the war on the plane, cursing the Great Satan and the Nigerians as well, and speculating on whether Osama the Gun would truly appear to lead them, whether this faceless hero might even now be among them.

  I wanted no part of this, least of all revealing myself, and so I lay on my cot feigning sleep until merciful sleep finally arrived. After the sunrise prayer, we were fed a breakfast of tasteless bread, oranges, and very bad coffee, and packed onto buses once more.

  We were driven to a nearby highway going south, so that all I saw of the Nigerian capital was a distant skyline of modern slabs and towers arranged in a crescent around the foot of a rocky outcrop. We drove south through sere flat countryside for no more than a quarter of an hour, which became a grassy plain, past small villages and smaller compounds of dried mud and thatch, somewhat larger clusters of tin-roofed shacks, fields of vegetables, fields of grazing livestock, a peaceful countryside.

  After about two hours of this, we reached a military encampment, a large and somewhat disorganized one. There were crooked rows of tents, more permanent-looking huts, large metal sheds of various shapes shimmering in the hot sun, tanks, trucks, armored personnel carriers, well-worn by the look of them, and parked in no particular order, artillery pieces and mobile rocket launchers draped in canvas covers.

  There was no fence around the camp, just a pole flying the green-white-green vertical stripes of the Nigerian flag to mark the entrance, and what grass there once might have been had long since been trampled into a field of dusty reddish-brown earth. As we drove through the camp, I saw thousands of soldiers, some in full combat uniform, some in pants and T-shirts alone or stripped to the waist, lounging about, gambling, kicking soccer balls around in small groups. While more of them than not had the brown skin and vaguely Arabic features of Hausas like Hamza, no few were stockier, flatter-featured, with skin such a dark shade of brown as to appear almost purple.

  We were driven through the camp to a group of small tents well away from everything else, with a flagpole flying a green banner with a white crescent before them, the flag of Islam itself, I supposed, at least as so conceived by the Nigerian Army. There we were unloaded and greeted by two score Nigerian soldiers commanded by a black-skinned sergeant, divided up into small groups, each led by a soldier who showed everyone to a private tent.

  My tent held a canvas cot, a wooden chest, an electric lamp run on batteries, a tin chamber pot, a prayer rug, and nothing more. As I was in the process of stowing my belongings in the chest, a different sergeant entered the tent, one I could recognize as a Hausa.

  “You come with me,” he ordered. He led me afoot away from what apparently was going to be the separate jihadi encampment, to an open jeep parked between two tanks whose treads lay in pieces on the ground.

  We boarded and he drove me through the camp to a hut larger than all the others, freshly thatched and whitewashed, with a satellite antenna on the roof and two flags flying before it, that of Nigeria and one with two yellow stars on green background. The sergeant ushered me inside but did not enter himself.

  There was only one large room in the building, cooled by a portable air conditioner hooked up to truck batteries. There was an air mattress on a wooden frame with bedding in good order, a kind of wardrobe, a large rattan armchair, a bank of half a dozen television sets on wheeled carts, a desk with a computer, a large table on sawhorses laden with maps and cell phones, and several folding chairs.

  Seated by the computer but facing outward was a flat-faced dark-skinned lieutenant. Standing to the right of the large table with eagles on his shoulders was a beaming Colonel Hamza.

  Seated behind the large table was an older Hausa with graying hair and two stars on the shoulders of his sharply-tailored and freshly pressed uniform.

  I stood there numbly, uncertain of what this was all about, not knowing what I was supposed to do. Seeing this, Hamza saluted me. “Welcome, Captain Osama!” he said.

  The lieutenant rose, came to attention, and likewise saluted. The General rose and regarded me expectantly for a long uncomfortable moment before I understood and saluted him.

  He returned the salute and sat down. “Stand at ease, Captain,” he said.

  Feeling anything but at ease, I just stood there.

  The General grimaced in annoyance at I knew not what. “Sit down,” he ordered gruffly.

  I sat down. So did the lieutenant. Hamza pulled up a chair and sat down too.

  “I am Major General Abdullah Kasim Moustapha and I am in command of this division. Colonel Hamza you already know. You, I am told, are the famous Osama the Gun. Prove this to me.”

  “I…I have sworn on the Koran to…Colonel Hamza that this is so, sir,” I stammered. “If you wish, I will do so again directly to you.”

  General Moustapha frowned. “That is not necessary and that will not do. Tell me of how the action in Paris was carried out, and do so in good detail.”

  And so, not quite sure whether I wanted to or not, but knowing that it did not matter, I found myself attempting to prove to a Nigerian general that I was truly Osama the Gun.

  Carefully gliding past how I had been sent to Paris as an agent of the Caliphate, how I had become the leader of the Ski Mask Jihadis, even the early graffiti-bomb actions, or even how the grenades had been secured, I went straight to the details of their nature, the percentage of explosives, incendiaries, gasses, the timers, how they were dispersed and deployed, while the General kept glancing at the lieutenant studying his screen, and the lieutenant kept nodding back as if in agreement to I knew not what.

  When I had finished, the General cast one more inquiring look at his lieutenant, and this time the lieutenant finally spoke. “It all agrees with what we have been able to get out of the French.”

  “A very well worked-out tactic,” General Moustapha told me approvingly. “You are to be congratulated, and even if you were not Osama the Gun then, you are now, Captain.”

  He turned to Hamza. “Colonel, see to it that our foreign legion is armed and in uniform by 16:00 tomorrow and lined up on the parade ground in good order before as many of our regulars as you can round up to witness the ceremony.”

  “Yes sir,” said Hamza and immediately
departed.

  “I will formally give you command at that time, Captain,” General Moustapha told me. “You will be required to speak to your troops. Make the speech a good one. That is an order. Prepare your words beforehand. That is only a suggestion. But it is a good one.”

  * * * *

  The General’s suggestion certainly was a good one, and I spent the evening and the morning and early afternoon of the next day trying to follow it, but my mind remained blank. The only speeches I had ever made in my life had been in the storeroom in St. Denis, they had been very short ones, and I had never worked out my words in advance.

  The thought of addressing two or three hundred men I did not know who were about to be placed under my unwilling and unprepared command terrified me more than the war footage I had seen on the airplane. What could I say to them? I had no idea.

  After the noon prayer, trucks arrived with green and khaki camouflage uniforms and caps for the jihadis. An hour later, more trucks brought our weapons. These were Kalashnikovs, new, but of a design a century old, and with Pakistani rather than Russian markings. When several of the men expressed their displeasure, they were told that the Kalashnikov was the perfected assault rifle: cheap, robust, and firing ammunition that was a world standard, which was why it had been the infantry weapon of choice for scores of armies, and still was.

  “The Americans in Viet Nam threw away their sophisticated M-16s when they could get their hands on these. Good enough for the Green Berets, good enough for you.”

  At 15:30 a dozen sergeants arrived, formed up the jihadis into more or less orderly ranks and marched them off to the main encampment. I was told to remain behind. At 15:50, Hamza himself drove up in a jeep and took me to within easy walking distance of a large parade ground in the middle of the camp, where a crowd of some thousands of Nigerian soldiers, some in full uniform, some not, most standing about idly in no particular order, some sitting on a few tanks and trucks strewn about the otherwise cleared area.

  Soldiers cleared an aisle through this gathering and Hamza led me through it in a terrified daze, praying to Allah to take command of me to prevent me from making an utter fool of myself.

  Beyond the Nigerians, the jihadis stood in a tight and orderly formation, more or less at attention, and facing General Moustapha, who stood in full formal uniform on a most informal wooden packing crate. Hamza marched me up to him, executed a smart turn, and stood at attention facing the troops at the general’s right hand.

  Hamza cocked his head at me, and understanding the signal, or supposing I did, I came to attention and saluted.

  The General saluted me back. “Welcome jihadis!” he roared. “Welcome to Nigeria, Holy Warriors of Islam! This is a great day for Nigeria! For now the whole world will see that United Nigeria no longer stands alone against the force the world most fears! Allahu Akbar!”

  “Allahu Akbar!” the jihadis roared back in unison. Some of them spontaneously fired their weapons in the air in the traditional Arab fashion. No one seemed to mind.

  There were answering cries of “Allahu Akbar!” from the Nigerians, but by no means all of them.

  “Long Live United Nigeria!” shouted the General.

  “Long Live United Nigeria!” his troops shouted back in what seemed a well rehearsed chorus.

  General Moustapha motioned to me to come forward, and I did, facing him. He produced two sets of captain’s bars, leaned down. and pinned them to my shoulders.

  “This is your captain and commander, jihadis,” he shouted, spinning me around to face the assembled troops. “This is the hero sent by Allah, soldiers of United Nigeria, to lead our Muslim brothers from all over the world into battle at our side, and strike terror into the hearts of the Americans and their Biafran dogs,” he declared with a self-satisfied grin, with which he climbed down off the crate and fairly shoved me atop it.

  And there I stood on a packing crate under the hot tropical sun confronting thousands of lounging African troops and some hundreds of what were now my own men looking up to me in rapt, expectant, and rigid attention. My knees trembled. My eyes mercifully refused to focus.

  “Tell them who you are!” said the General. He did not need to tell me that this was an order.

  My mind was already empty, but I opened my heart like an empty vessel and prayed to Allah to fill it with Himself. And my prayer was answered. I found myself speaking without thinking, without knowing what I would say before I said it, riding the Will of Allah as a small boat upon a mighty wave dredged up from the deepest waters of my soul.

  “I am who Allah has made me. I am a small boy with dreams of adventure and glory. I am a man who Allah has given a task too great to be supported by my weak shoulders. I am no more than one of you.”

  I heard uneasy murmurs. I could not really see the faces of the Nigerians but on those of the jihadis assembled before me I saw less than enthusiasm at such meek and humble words. But there was another side to such humility and Allah granted me the wisdom to give it voice.

  “I am no more than one of you, but you are jihadis, my brothers, and I am no less. You are Holy Warriors of Islam, and so am I. You are weapons in the Hands of Allah, and so am I. You are the swords of Allah…and I…and I…”

  I hesitated to speak the words, fearing their power to force me to make them come alive in deeds. I looked up into the blinding sun and let its light fill me, and Allah spoke to me from within that light to my unwilling heart, not in words, but in the courage born of the full acceptance of His Will, for this was what He meant me to be, and so it was what I must truly become.

  “You are the swords of Allah…and I am Osama His Gun!”

  “Allahu Akbar!

  As the jihadis shouted it out to a man and fired their weapons at the sky, what I saw on their faces was as much relief as fierce passion, though there was enough of that.

  “Osama the Gun! Osama the Gun!”

  The Africans picked up the cry, turning it into a chant with a lilting uplifting rhythm—

  “O-sama, the Gun! O-sama, O-Sama, O-sama, the Gun.”

  Somewhere among them a metallic drumbeat picked it up. And another. And another. Soldiers beat it out on the metal of tanks and trucks. No few of them began to dance to it.

  And there under the African sun I found myself a hero. A hero to his own men. A hero to an embattled army. A warrior hero. A hero in their eyes but still a fraud in my own.

  A legendary warrior hero who had yet to see the face of war.

  CHAPTER 25

  I was left to my own devices, as if I was really fit to be a captain in the Nigerian Army or any other, as if I knew how to turn 263 men from at least a dozen countries into a military unit capable of being commanded by anyone.

  But I had to try, and all I knew of such organization was what evolved in Paris, so finding myself once more “Caid of caids,” I chose twenty men more or less at random to serve as caids under me, allowed them to call themselves “sergeants,” and assigned each some dozen men.

  We had a majority of Arabic speakers, but also Pashtun and Urdu-speaking Afghans and Pakistanis, some Kurds, Turks from Germany and Turkey itself, half a dozen beurs speaking French and some Arabic, British-born Pakistanis, Malay speakers, Chechens, Albanians, and so forth, so I assigned on the basis of language. Arabic-speaking caids commanded men who understood at least some Arabic, there were enough Urdu and Pashtun speakers to form two squads, enough Turkish speakers for a squad, and the rest had to make do with English, for inevitably that was the most common second language, so there was nothing for it but to make the language of the Great Satan the language of overall command.

  I saw no point in marching and drilling, and from what I could see, neither did the Nigerians, so I dispensed with such parade ground rituals and concentrated on target practice, to familiarize everyone, including myself, with the Kalashnikov, and also to see just what sort of soldiers had
been placed under my command.

  The Kalashnikov proved easy enough to master. You aimed it in the general direction of the fuel drums and boards set up as targets, held down the trigger, and blew them full of holes. Marksmanship was another matter. Anyone could fire single shots with quick squeezes and releases of the trigger, but hitting a man-sized target at a hundred yards required skill that few of us had. Some men who had been hunters were good at it, but the Caliphate had not been in anything like a real war since the Sons of Osama had taken over Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the guerilla wars in the rest of the countries were tales told by fathers, and no one among us professed to ever having been a professional soldier.

  Those of my men under thirty or so were passionate young Muslims or members of the great army of the unemployed in countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Syria, or both. The older ones I thought it best not to question beyond what they were willing to tell me, since many of them had the hardened visages and closed-mouth attitudes of petty professional criminals. In short, more or less what Hamza had promised me, a miniature Islamic version of the French Foreign Legion.

  Nevertheless I commanded a respect and even awe from these men that I knew full well was undeserved. I was the legendary Osama the Gun, was I not, and I was constantly pressed for tales of my exploits, real or imagined, and modesty did not seem to be a useful tactic under the circumstances.

  Which were two weeks of little but target practice and boredom. The jihadis were eager to see our first action, but the Nigerians welcomed the respite, and were well-drilled at passing their idle time drinking, smoking ganja, gambling, playing football and basketball, playing music, dancing to it, entertaining themselves with boastful and humorous talk, and many seemed to have mastered the art of doing absolutely nothing.

  We jihadis were encouraged to mingle with the regular troops, no doubt an attempt to rally their spirits by our voluntary presence, and they were all too willing to share their experiences with us, no more so than with Osama the Gun.