Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  Finally, exhaustion overcame terror, and I found myself standing bent over with my hands on my thighs, sucking in air. Kasim was doing likewise close by, some of my men had fallen yards behind and were staggering forward, others had all but collapsed yards ahead.

  The Nigerians were closer now, running, trotting, walking and stumbling like old men, and the American drones were clearly visible, the model planes of hundreds of vicious small boys writ large and rapacious, raining down explosions, bodies and body parts flying into the air, smoke, and flame, and the reek of chemicals and burnt flesh, Satan’s hell upon the Earth and churning towards me.

  And then, miles to the south, an immense fireball rose from the ground, followed by the loudest sound I had ever heard, and when it was gone, I could hear thousands upon thousands of screams and shouts from the onrushing Nigerian soldiers, all of those who still could running now, the rest stumbling, falling, crawling northward with their remaining strength, rolling into craters, curling up into balls and covering their heads with their arms.

  “Vultures!”

  “Vultures!”

  “The Vultures are coming!”

  I gave no order, I just turned and ran, not even looking to see if my men were following. I ran and ran and ran, a pitiful cowardly creature, hearing more of the immense explosions in the distance, coming closer and closer and closer. Singly and in ragged little groups, men streamed by me, fell back, staggered, ran some more, collapsed, got up again, my own men that I had forgotten in my panic, Nigerians, all of us reduced to no more than terrified beasts fleeing for their lives before a forest fire, fleeing for our very souls before the demons of the Great Satan.

  The whooshing and booming of the drones above me now. A trail of smoke to the left. An explosion. Screams of pain. An explosion mere yards behind. A man’s arm flying by. A shower of blood.

  I ran and I ran and I ran, praying to Allah but unable to pray for anything as human as salvation, but only like an animal for the next step forward, the next breath of air. And that at least Allah the Merciful did grant me, allowing me to become that animal, as if He had taken me with His helping hand as I had taken the hand of the exhausted Hassan on Hagar’s Run.

  How long this lasted I did not know. How long does eternity last for a soul in hell?

  But as I had led Hassan through his holy task in the Al-Haram Mosque, so did Allah lead my soul out of this most unholy of nightmares, and I became a man again when at last the river was in sight in the distance.

  A man filled with anger and shame. Anger at the demons raining down rockets on the Nigerians rushing forward all around me, anger at the huge explosions slaughtering them by the hundreds in the rear, anger at their distant controllers staring into their video screens and drinking their Coca Colas in the so-called “Heartland” of a nation displaying its very lack of a human heart.

  Shame at the cowardly thing that the Great Satan had made me become. Shame at abandoning the men Allah had entrusted to my command.

  I swore to Allah that I would die before I so shamed myself and Him again. I could have dashed directly to the rafts, but now I paused at risk to my own life amidst the explosions and death to see to my men.

  It was a crowded chaos of Nigerian soldiers scrambling towards the river bank, but I saw that Kasim’s squad had stuck close by me, gathered more or less together and easily visible amidst all the black faces, with Kasim prodding them forward from the rear. All but two of them. Reza and a Kurd whose name I did not even remember were never to be seen again.

  No words were spoken; in any case none could have been heard amidst the screams and cries and engine noises and explosions. Kasim and I herded the jihadis like a pair of sheep dogs through the Nigerians to the river bank. Nigerians were already scrambling onto the hundreds of waiting rafts, but more of them than not were still empty, and we all managed to secure one together.

  A small riverboat began towing us across to safety. All along the southern bank of the Benué, rafts laden with soldiers were being pulled away from the shore, soldiers were scrambling onto empty rafts, more were piling up behind them, while the American Falcons continued to harry their rear, though the Vultures were no longer in evidence dropping their powerful bombs.

  By the time our raft was halfway across, the entire river behind and around us was all but a solid wall of rafts, all of us entirely at the mercy of the robots of the United States Air Force, and terror once more gripped me by the throat.

  But the Americans did not attack these helpless targets. The Falcons ceased fire. The little jets gathered together into a single huge V formation over the Nigerian troops still on the southern shore, like a great flock of metal geese. They dropped down to fly scant yards above the Nigerians crowding the shore, following the river bank eastward until they had disappeared.

  Minutes later they were back, flying west at the same altitude, but directly over the river itself now, over the rafts, over my own head, and beyond. The formation then climbed, executed a mocking full roll together, and disappeared to the south.

  I found myself hating the Great Satan even more for this jaunty and taunting aerobatic gesture than for all the slaughter its pilotless aircraft had done, hating the Falcons for the living beings they were not, hating their controllers playing with life and death from thousands of kilometers away like the video game this war was for them, congratulating themselves on their victory without courage, without a human heart.

  I could not help but imagine Gregory Mohammed’s son at one of the consoles. And most of all I hated that which could turn the son of a hadji into a killer for an ignoble cause who would burn in hell for the blithe and cowardly murders of uncountable men seen as no more than images on a video screen.

  The Americans were not the Great Satan. The Great Satan was that which had made the Americans what they had become. Satan was not a being with a malignant soul but a thing with no soul at all. Dragging the souls of men not down into a fiery pit but into its own soul-less darkness.

  Whatever the Nigerians believed they were fighting for did not matter.

  This was the enemy of the soul.

  This was what all souls must fight against or be lost.

  That was the Jihad.

  That was the mission Allah had entrusted to Islam.

  CHAPTER 26

  General Moustapha’s division was one of five encamped above the Benué between the Niger and the Cameroon border, and each of them took their turn assaulting the Biafrans across it, so that it was weeks before we would be ordered into another hell Made in the USA.

  I was certainly no general, I could not even count myself a competent captain, having lost seven men including two in the squad I had directly commanded in the process of accomplishing nothing at all to be proud of and those who seemed to be doing no more than causing the pointless slaughter of thousands of their own men by repeating the same foredoomed tactic over and over.

  Their first experience in such a catastrophe had left my jihadis enraged at the Americans, but not much less at General Moustapha and the Nigerian command and understandably reluctant to sacrifice more of their comrades and perhaps their own lives in such a fiasco again.

  They grumbled, they cursed the Nigerian officers, though not the Nigerian soldiers, whose courage could only be admired. It was not a matter of cowardice, but simply of common sense. “We are fighting an army of djins, not men,” I was told one way or another any number of times.

  I could hardly disagree with them for, like djin, the robot aircraft were more powerful than mere men, soulless demons serving their satanic cause without fear or mercy. If djins had not truly walked the Earth in the time of the Prophet, they certainly stalked the skies now.

  All I could tell them was that we must face them fearlessly and heedless of our own lives as Holy Warriors of Islam, for this was our duty as Muslims and jihadis.

  “We honor the martyrs who
gave up their lives for the cause of Islam in this Jihad against the Great Satan, to bring down their Twin Towers, as have suicide bombers all over the world, and Allah immediately rewarded them by admission to Paradise. Can we wish less for ourselves?”

  “All well and good,” was the general reply, “but the suicide bombers and the jihadis of 9/11 knew that they would be wounding the enemy. The seven who died here fleeing for their lives knew that their deaths would accomplish nothing. The Nigerians are sent to die for no purpose and we’ve been brought here to do the same.”

  I could hardly disagree with this either. Hamza had told me we were being brought to Nigeria to increase the “baraka” of our “Muslim brothers,” but being their brothers only in futile death did nothing I could see but drain our own.

  So I passed much of the idle time among the Nigerians, trying to find the sense in this seemingly senseless war.

  Why did all five Nigerian divisions never attack at once?

  “It was tried, twice,” a Hausa lieutenant told me. “The first time even with tanks ferried across the river. We drove the Biafrans almost as far back as Enugu Airport even with the Falcons cutting us to pieces. The Americans sent in scores of Vultures to drop fuel-air bombs all the way back to the Benué. Made the last battle seem like a harmless football match. The second time, we had no more tanks, it was all infantry, they hit the rafts, and we lost a whole division before we even got across.”

  He shrugged. “The Americans set the rules of engagement. They could destroy our whole army, but as long as we don’t break them, they play by them too.”

  This only made the war seem all the more senseless. I had seen the map on General Moustapha’s table and remembered its general outlines. I sought out the Yoruba soldier I had spoken to before.

  “The western border of the Zone and of the territory claimed by ‘New Biafra’ is the Niger River. Why not cross it in force well upstream from the junction with the Benué and make for the refinery at Warri while the Biafrans and the Americans are fighting the latest attack across the Benué?”

  “Invade Yoruba territory?” he told me indignantly. “If this army crosses the Niger, it becomes a Hausa army invading our land, and no Yoruba will stand for that! We’d all desert, and we would secede too. We’re the civilized heart of this country, the Hausas are Bedouin Muslim barbarians who envy us, and if they tried that, it would be the end of United Nigeria, and a Yoruba Republic would give them something to envy, let me tell you!”

  All that I could gather by questioning Nigerians made no sense at all to a foreign jihadi who was not one of them. If there was such a thing as a “Nigerian” at all. “New Biafra” was a breakaway state of Igbos claiming the lands from the Benué south to the sea between the Niger and the Cameroon border as its rightful tribal territory, but the Americans only protected the southern part of it where the oil wells, refineries, and pipelines were. The Yorubas supported the Hausa-led army fighting for a United Nigeria, but would secede themselves if it violated their own tribal territory.

  So all four parties confined the hostilities to the Zone. This conflict was more like the gang wars in American cities I had seen in films as a boy than the Holy War I had so naively imagined until I found myself dropped down into it.

  The question I did not ask, feared to ask, was where was the cause of Islam in all this? I knew in my heart what my jihadis were fighting against, but what would be Islam’s victory even if the Great Satan were driven out? How could I tell them what we were fighting for if I didn’t know myself?

  * * * *

  Finally the turn of General Moustapha’s division to attack across the Benué came round once more. The Nigerians took the announcement that they would be sent through the gates of hell the next day in a spirit I found difficult indeed to comprehend. There were no desertions as far as I could see, and the soldiers spent the day before cleaning their weapons, playing their short-sided games of football and basketball, lounging idly about, as if without care for what would come on the morrow.

  Bravery I could only admire, but this seemed like courage well beyond the point of madness, and that I could not comprehend, so I spent the day among the ordinary soldiers asking them why they fought on.

  This question was greeted mostly with shrugs, as if these men had never asked it of themselves. Some Hausas from the north really did see it as a Holy War and therefore persisted in their duty to Islam. Many were professional soldiers who had simply trained not to think about disobeying orders. More of them than not seemed willing to risk their lives in another futile assault simply because they had seen so many of their comrades die around them.

  “You start out fighting for a cause, then you find yourself shooting back at men who are shooting at you,” one Yoruba private told me. “Finally you end up fighting just because it is a war and you are in it. If you refuse to advance, you are shot by your own officers. If you try to desert, you are shot if you are caught, and if not, you live the rest of your life shamed in the eyes of your family, shamed in the eyes of the men you abandoned, shamed in your own eyes.”

  My own men, having volunteered to fight in the war, were certainly no cowards, but had no stomach for dying in another attempt to destroy abandoned villages, mud huts, and petrol pumps, so that night I gathered them together a short distance away from our tents and gave them the only orders that made any sense to me under these senseless circumstances.

  “We are jihadis fighting to show the flag of Islam,” I told them. “That is what we are here to do. And until we find a way to do it, I see no cause here worth dying for. Do you?”

  There were cries of enthusiastic agreement at that!

  “And so tomorrow we will cross the river as before, and we will obey the order to advance behind the Nigerian troops and destroy what we can…”

  I paused to allow the grumbling to begin, but then raised my hand for silence.

  “We have no specific orders as to how far we are to advance or at what pace. So I order you to advance at a far more leisurely pace that before and not nearly so far, setting off your charges if only to blow holes in the ground, so that at least we will have something to show for it in the way of expended ammunition. And I order all sergeants to lead their squads back to the rafts at the first distant sounds of approaching American aircraft. Let us hope that all this will not be too clear to the Nigerian officers, but have I made it clear to you?”

  The next morning we were taken to the Benué, I with a squad composed of Urdu-speaking Pakistanis and Afghans. I knew no Urdu, and most of them spoke neither Arabic, French, nor English, but Hamid, their sergeant, had passable English as well as Urdu, and I had decided to show my face to each of the twenty squads under my command until Osama the Gun had marched among them all or the war had ended, whichever came first.

  It began as before. The Biafrans had packed new earth into the gaps in their riverside breastworks, and their front line crouched behind them, with the rest of their troops scattered farther back on the churned-up battlefield. Once more they fired futilely across the river at the Nigerians. Once more the Nigerian artillery pulled back and began its bombardment. Once more the rafts began crossing under cover of the barrage. Once more, the Biafrans abandoned their crumbled fortifications before they were halfway across, and fled south.

  Once the full Nigerian division had crossed the river and was chasing south after the Biafrans, my jihadis crossed without danger or incident as before. Once more, we had to pass through a zone littered with the dead and the dying, fresh blood just beginning to soak into the earth, spilled intestines and brains blasted from shattered skulls, once more there was fear, horror, and disgust among us, until we had trotted out onto the abandoned plain.

  But then I called a halt, reminded my jihadis of my orders, spread out the squads, and I proceeded south over the empty plain with Hamid’s squad, moving no more quickly than if we were out for a stroll in a park.
<
br />   * * * *

  It was, of course, no parkland, with hardly a blade of grass to be seen or a tree still standing, with fresh craters still smoking amidst the generations of older ones, with fresh corpses among skeletons and pieces of bone long since picked clean and bleached by the sun.

  There seemed nothing at all to blow up, and I began to believe I would have to order Hamid to have the men carry out my half-serious order to expend our charges blowing more holes in the ground. But we finally reached a rough circle of five abandoned and ruined huts which had probably been no more than a farm family’s compound, to judge by what remained of the mud wall beside it which had once served as a livestock corral.

  I ordered Hamid to have his men place charges in all of the huts, ridiculous as it seemed, ridiculous as it was, and we blew them all to dust and small shards of dried palm fronds before moving even more slowly on.

  We encountered an old crater where some sort of small building had taken a direct hit, but there was nothing left but fragments of baked mud in the hole, then a burned field of some unidentifiable crop, and finally a well that was now just a scattering of bricks around yet another hole in the ground.

  I was about to give the order to drop a charge down it when I heard a far distant buzzing on the edge of audibility and a series of faint sounds as of the far off popping of children’s balloons.

  But I knew what it was. We all did. We looked at each other for a moment and then we were off back towards the river much faster than when we came. By the time we reached the river, I could clearly hear the sounds of distant explosions and the buzzings and whooshings of the aerial demons of the Great Satan, and looking behind, I saw the flowers of flame marching ever closer across the plain behind us, though the fleeing Nigerian troops were still too far away to be visible.