Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  Such was the sanitized vision of the satellite camera’s distant eye. As befitted such demons, nothing was visible of the metallic djins of the Great Satan save the path of their terrible destruction. No human death could be seen. But anyone who had been on the ground during such an aerial attack could all too easily see that this was one of the most terrible of such Satanic onslaughts, could translate these simple video game images into an army disintegrating into a disorganized horde of individual men fleeing in terror, could see men by the hundreds blown to pieces within those neatly-rendered explosions, could hear the screams of pain and terror.

  We all watched in silence. What was there to say?

  Long live United Nigeria?

  The American robots were slaughtering the “heroic army of United Nigeria.”

  Allahu Akbar?

  Osama the Gun and his Ski Mask Jihadis had their success, but at what cost?

  Nor would the watching world know it.

  * * * *

  Or so I had thought. But the next afternoon a sergeant appeared at my tent to convey me to “Colonel Hamza’s headquarters,” an earthen-walled and thatched-roof hut with a satellite dish on a tower beside it. Inside were a series of four televisions with chip decks on wheeled tables, some canvas sling-chairs, a hammock slung on a metal stand, a computer station, a table littered with cell phones, some filing cabinets, and not much else.

  Hamza sat behind the table talking on one of the phones as I entered. “Absolutely! At eighteen hundred.”

  He nodded me over to a chair by one of the TV monitors where nothing was running. “Al Jazeera? Of course. He’s here with me now.”

  He finished his phone conversation and came over to me grinning with excitement. “CNN got a camera crew in!” he fairly burbled. “They’ve already broadcast it, TV Biafra won’t show it of course, but UNT can be seen in most of Biafra and they’ll be running it at six o’clock, and according to what I’ve just been told, Al Jazeera’s already licensed the rights from the Americans.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “This!” exclaimed Hamza as he slipped a video chip into a deck and turned it on.

  The CNN logo appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Across the bottom a red banner with yellow letters proclaimed “The War For New Biafra.” The rest of the screen was filled with the clearly identifiable image of a green face smeared on the wall of a ruined building as a woman’s voice spoke.

  “This graffiti scrawled in paint has appeared on or near the sites of scores of the series of unexplained explosions that rocked the western borders of Free New Biafra during yesterday’s incursion by Nigerian federal forces.…”

  Multiple images of the Ski Mask Jihadi, some more or less complete, others fragmentary, succeeded each other on the screen as the newsreader spoke; on a blasted boathouse, a rusty old ferry half-sunk in shallows, the remains of a dockside warehouse, a section of concrete wall, the side of something that might have been a barn…

  “…and which severely damaged the bridge over the Niger River at Onitsha…”

  And there it was, the bridge over the Niger, with three jagged sections of roadbed hanging into the water from gaps where pylons had been shattered, and one of them showing the lower half of the face of the Ski Mask Jihadi as the camera zoomed in on it.

  “Although the Nigerian command has claimed that the series of explosions within Biafra along the Niger River yesterday were the result of action by the Nigerian army, Biafran military sources tell CNN that this could not have been possible, and this is confirmed by the Pentagon…”

  An American major general, short-haired and hatless in a blue uniform, spoke to the camera.

  “The federal Nigerian troops never reached a point closer than seventy-five kilometers to any of the explosions reported before being driven back with heavy casualties by the Falcons and Vultures of the United States Air Force…”

  A woman wearing a camouflage suit with her blond hair done up in a bun spoke into a hand-held microphone standing beside the whitewashed wall of a dockside building still intact enough to be displaying a more or less perfect image of the Ski Mask Jihadi down to the empty eye sockets, even to the hand holding up the silhouette of Osama’s Gun.

  “Whoever was responsible for these attacks on civilian targets left graffiti-bombs signing their evil work with this image—”

  Across the screen flashed images of the Ski Mask Jihadi familiar to me and no doubt the rest of the world from the French coverage of the graffiti bomb attacks on Paris—on the Arch de Triomph, the facade of Notre Dame, Trocadero, Sacré Cœur, the Hôtel de Ville.

  “—of the same face smeared all over Paris—”

  Now there were images of the results of the grenade attacks on Paris—a blasted ticket kiosk and bodies on the ground at the foot of one pillar of the Eiffel Tower, twin aisles of trees aflame in the Jardin du Plantes, tourists frantically swimming away from a sinking bateau mouche, shaky helicopter footage from high above the city displaying the panorama of destruction.

  “—during the vicious multiple bombings by the so-called Ski Mask Jihadis led by the notorious Islamic terrorist known as Osama the Gun.”

  Hamza turned off the machine and beamed at me. “What luck! TV Biafra won’t touch it, of course, but they’ve been running it every news cycle on CNN International and every half hour on CNN Headline News, and broadcasts will blanket Biafra with it at six tonight! And tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow UNT will run an exclusive live interview with Osama the Gun!”

  “What?”

  “Well, no, not exactly exclusive, don’t worry,” Hamza hastened to add as if that were the source of my astounded dismay. “United Nigerian Television gets to air it live at six, but of course you’ll be recorded, and Al Jazeera will run it two hours later.”

  He shrugged. “CNN we don’t know yet, but if they don’t take it, BBC World is almost as good.”

  * * * *

  A United Nigeria Television truck with a camera crew, a satellite uplink antenna, a director, and an interviewer, all Hausa, all male, arrived in the camp at three in the afternoon the next day, and the director was immediately whisked to a conference with General Moustapha and Colonel Hamza in the General’s headquarters.

  Hamza had handed me a script shortly before they arrived. It consisted of a series of leading questions—why are you here in Nigeria, what is your opinion of the fighting spirit of the Nigerian army, why do you believe that the cause of United Nigeria is worth risking your life for though you are not a Nigerian, and so forth—to which I was given a series of morale-boosting answers to memorize.

  I had given much thought to what I must say and how I must appear when I faced the UNT camera after leaving Hamza’s “headquarters” yesterday afternoon, and discussed it at some length with my sergeants. We all agreed that whatever the purpose of Hamza or General Moustapha or the Nigerian high command might be, we were not here to serve it except where it served the cause of Islam itself. Osama the Gun should not serve as a mouthpiece for patriotic Nigerian propaganda. Nor appear alone.

  “I cannot memorize this…this script,” I had told Hamza.

  “Don’t worry about forgetting your lines, we can write them on big cardboards and someone can hold them up behind the camera.”

  “I’m not going to recite someone else’s words like a parrot.”

  Hamza shrugged. “Answer the questions however you like then,” he said agreeably, “the cards will just be there to help you in case you can’t think of your own answers.”

  “I will not be interrogated by an interviewer either,” I told him.

  “You will do this broadcast, Captain, and that is an order. And it is not only my order but General Moustapha’s!”

  “I’ll do the broadcast,” I told him, “but I’ll do it my w
ay.”

  “Which is?” demanded Hamza testily.

  “I will be masked,” I told him. “No one but my jihadis and the troops in this camp have seen the face behind the mask of Osama the Gun and it would be madness to reveal it on television.”

  “No problem with that,” Hamza said more easily.

  “I want all my men on camera too, masked of course.”

  Hamza laughed. “You’re sure you haven’t done this before, Osama?”

  “No interviewer. I will speak whatever words Allah chooses to put in my mouth.”

  “Which are?”

  “I’ll know what they are at the time,” I told him.

  “The television people are not going to like this.”

  “I am not under the command of United Nigeria Television. Clear it with General Moustapha. If he objects…”

  I shrugged, not really knowing what I would do if the General did.

  At which point the UNT truck had arrived and I was constrained to wait outside the General’s headquarters while General Moustapha, Colonel Hamza, and the UNT director conferred inside for over an hour.

  When Hamza finally emerged, he seemed in high good humor, but the television director was scowling, and shot me a poisonous look as he stormed silently towards the UNT truck.

  “What happened?”

  Hamza grinned. “The General was pleased with your idea, I was pleased with the General who promised me promotion to brigadier, but the General was not at all pleased with the television director, and he is not at all pleased with any of us. The director was furious with you for refusing to do things his way. And he expected to be able to enliven the show with background pictures of this encampment, but General Moustapha told him that he was an idiot if he thought that could be permitted, because if the Americans knew where Osama the Gun and his jihadis were bivouacked they’d bomb this camp to ashes.”

  And so as six o’clock approached, the UNT truck was parked well outside the perimeter of the camp, with my men, green-masked and with their Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, lined up in formation a dozen ranks deep before the camera with nothing to be seen in the background but sky, grassland, and the green flag with the white crescent emblematic of the Ski Mask Jihadis flying from its pole behind them.

  General Moustapha had seen to this placement himself and stood behind the cameraman with the director and Hamza, checking it out on the camera monitor, and when he was satisfied, he called me over to have a look.

  The director had made the best of the military limitations inflicted on him, for the screen of the monitor was entirely filled with ranks and files of armed and masked men, so that from what would be broadcast it would be impossible to tell whether there were scores or hundreds or even thousands of them.

  I nodded my approval, donned my own mask, and took my position before the center of the first rank. I still had no idea of what I was going to say, and prayed that since it had been the Will of Allah that had brought me here, He would not abandon me now.

  And as the director raised his hand above his head so as to bring it down as the command for me to begin, I was indeed inspired, if not yet with words, then with a gesture that spoke its meaning without them.

  As the broadcast was about to begin, I stepped backwards to speak from within the ranks of my jihadis, and as the director’s hand came down, it was as if Allah had given me this sign to speak, for the words that arose through me seemed His, not my own.

  “In the name of Allah, the All-Knowing, the All-Powerful! We are the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun. We have been sent to Nigeria by the Will of Allah to fight against the enemies of Islam wherever they are to be found. We are Holy Warriors from all the lands of Dar al-Islam. We are many and we are the first of many more. We are here to fight at the side of our Muslim Nigerian brothers to show the world that no true sons of Islam, white or black, stand alone against the forces of the Great Satan, be they men, machines, or djin. For we are Islam itself rising up to fight in this battle in the Holy War against America here in Nigeria as on every battlefield where the forces of the Great Satan are to be found.”

  These words emerged from within me as if I were a dervish dancing in a holy trance, and so too the gesture which followed as I pointed to my green mask.

  “You who oppose the Will of Allah, behold the face of your eternal enemy! Let all who fight on the side of Allah behold the face of the Holy Warriors who will always be at your side! Behold the face that struck terror into the hearts of the enemies of Islam in Paris! Behold the face that will strike terror into their hearts here!”

  I unslung my weapon and raised it overhead.

  “Behold the face of Osama the Gun!”

  Though this much had arisen through me like a tide of words bearing me where they would as Allah seized me as His instrument, now I remembered what Ali had told me of how Mexican revolutionaries had created a costume that itself became their leader, that could be worn by many men.

  “I am Osama the Gun! I speak to you as the man behind the mask whose face will never be seen.”

  I gestured back and forth and up and down the ranks of my masked jihadis. “But we all wear this same mask. For the mask of Osama the Gun is the face of the Ski Mask Jihadi! This mask conceals the flesh of whoever wears it, but reveals the spirit. For this is the true face of the Jihad!”

  I prayed to Allah to make the UNT director understand what I was doing as I stepped forward, and show in close-up that mask alone.

  “This mask may be worn by any man, and so it does not conceal, it reveals. For those who wear it and those who are its enemy, this is the face of Islam itself!”

  I raised my gun.

  “Allahu Akbar!” I shouted and it was as if I were once more stoning the pillars of Satan at Mina as I fired a long burst skyward. “Death to the Great Satan!”

  From behind me came the sound of massed gunfire and the collective voice of my jihadis.

  “Death to the Great Satan! Allahu Akbar!”

  The voice behind the face of the Ski Mask Jihadi. The voice of the multitude stoning the pillars of Satan at Mina. The voice of the hajis circling round the Ka’aba. The voice of Dar al-Islam itself.

  “Allahu Akbar!” I shouted. “This is the Jihad! We are all Osama the Gun!”

  CHAPTER 29

  The appearance of Osama the Gun and his Ski Mask Jihadis on television was an advent so potent that even I found the results unsettlingly magical.

  Most of Biafra could receive the live United Nigeria Television broadcast, and those Igbos who had not seen it heard about it through word of mouth within the hour. CNN ran it every hour for a full day, and so did UNT, and since no one in Biafra could know how few jihadis had actually come to fight against them or how many more might be pouring in to join us, the Ski Mask Jihadis became in their eyes far more than we really were, and Osama the Gun an immediate legendary figure of terror.

  And illusory though this was, it soon had concrete military consequences.

  The next Nigerian offensive across the Benué was launched well east of the Niger and no Ski Mask Jihadis had infiltrated to plant explosives beforehand, but we had a phantom effect even in our absence, for the fortifications on the Biafran side of the river were empty. The Nigerian troops found themselves trotting unopposed across the devastated Zone, encountering no Biafran forces at all and coming within distant sight of cultivated fields and populated townships before the Falcons and Vultures arrived to drive them back.

  And the American drone aircraft retired as soon as they had sent the Nigerians reeling back towards the Benué, as if, with the Biafrans having failed to put up any show of defending the territory they claimed between the southern fringes of the Zone and the Benué, the Great Satan had become indifferent to defending it for them.

  This was the closest thing to a “success” that any of these thrusts had ever achieved, a
nd the Nigerian high command seemed to assume that the Biafrans had pulled their troops back from the Zone beforehand in order to better defend their towns and agricultural heartland from the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun.

  So just as the Biafrans had been unduly daunted by what they had seen on television, so the morale of the Nigerian Army had been unduly boosted by it, and all the more so because the truth had even been withheld from General Moustapha’s fellow division commanders, and in the wake of this “success,” they were all clamoring for Ski Mask Jihadi units of their own.

  These demands had been passed up to the army high command, who had dropped them in the lap of Hamza, now promoted to Brigadier General, with orders to satisfy all of these field commanders without revealing the true situation to anyone who did not have a need to know, which was no one who did not know already.

  As a Major General, Moustapha still outranked Brigadier Hamza, and when Hamza approached him with the vague notion of somehow dividing the Ski Mask Jihadis up among the five front line divisions, he would have none of it.

  Hamza sought me out in no little agitation after his unsuccessful meeting with General Moustapha. “He told me that every soldier in his division knew there were about 250 Ski Mask Jihadis in this camp, and if eighty percent of them disappeared and surfaced elsewhere, it would be impossible to keep up the pretense they weren’t all there really were.”

  “He does have a point,” I told him.

  “Of course he has a point! But the high command had a point too and it is my behind sitting atop both of them, which is not a comfortable position! The question is what are we going to do about it?”

  “We, General Hamza?”

  “If you had simply read the answers to some simple questions instead of playing the Madhi—”