Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  The weeks wore on, the war wore on, but nothing of consequence happened. The army of United Nigeria did even less than before, for the high command had finally given up on the regular forays across the Benué, crossing the river only when Biafran forces made half-hearted attempts to re-establish their presence within the Zone, which was not very often. Then a division would be sent across, the Biafrans would flee, and the American Falcons would chase the Nigerians back across the river with far lighter casualties than in the months before.

  Osama the Gun had become the hero of a war that was certain to be lost. The Great Satan could not be defeated here. The Americans would remain until they had withdrawn the last drop of oil and that would be their victory and only then could the war end.

  With the end of the regular Nigerian marches into the Zone, my men became cynical. How could they not? They now knew they had been recruited to fight in a war that the Nigerian military had known all along it could not win and now was no longer even trying. How could they believe they were fighting for Islam when the so-called Muslim government of United Nigeria was concerned only with staying in power long enough to re-establish its rule over the whole country once Americans were gone?

  But that stripping away of illusion made me see the true war clearly. If I could not believe that fighting for the cause of United Nigeria was fighting for Islam, if I could not understand how a Caliphate that financed the Nigerians’ purchase of weapons but continued to sell oil to the Great Satan could be the true champion of Islam, my loss of belief in the causes of nations only strengthened my belief in the cause of Allah.

  That was the only cause worth fighting for on whatever battlefield the Holy Warrior might find himself. Making any battlefield part of the true Jihad was the duty of the jihadi fighting. We must be free to fight our war, not their war, not for a United Nigeria but for Islam and Allah. And if fighting for Nigeria was not fighting for Islam, perhaps we could make fighting for Islam fighting for Nigeria.

  This I told to General Hamza, more or less, asking him to pass my request up to the high command. Being the man who had accused me of playing the Madhi, he more or less understood what I was saying and not entirely without agreement, but not the military specifics of what I was requesting.

  “I want independent command of my unit,” I told him.

  “Independent of the high command? Don’t be ridiculous, Major!”

  “Independent of the division commanders. My men need action. I want to send missions into Biafra continuously without waiting for orders or requests from them or anyone else.”

  Hamza seemed to mull this over approvingly. “The high command wouldn’t object to that,” he admitted. “But the division commanders certainly would, including General Moustapha. You’re a mere major, there’s got to be someone of equal rank to them over you to get them to swallow it.”

  “Then why not you? Why not transfer the Ski Mask Jihadis to the psychological warfare corps? We are the psychological warfare corps, after all.”

  “But I’m only a Brigadier, the division commanders all outrank me.”

  “Surely the generals of the high command who outrank them can remedy that,” I told him slyly. “How many more stars do you need?”

  Hamza laughed. “Two more would be nice, but one will do, they don’t like giving you more than one at a time for fear you might start thinking of yourself as a potential generalissimo.…”

  Hamza got his extra star, the Ski Mask Jihadis were transferred to the psychological warfare corps under him, I received a promotion to lieutenant colonel because, according to Hamza, it helped justify his promotion, General Moustapha was mollified because the psychological warfare corps remained bivouacked at his encampment under a general of equal rank, and nothing was really heard from the other division commanders.

  This accomplished, I had my lieutenants muster my men before our tents to give them the news, standing beside the flag of the white crescent on a green field, the unit ensign that the Nigerians had assigned us when we first arrived.

  “Praise be to Allah,” I told them, “the Ski Mask Jihadis are now an independent unit fighting not for Nigeria but in Nigeria in our own war, not theirs.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” someone shouted.

  “The Nigerian army assigned us this flag,” I told them, pointing to the banner beside me, “but this is now the banner of Islam itself. This is now truly our flag and we will fight under no other.”

  Still there seemed to be general incomprehension.

  “We all came here to fight for the cause of Allah, but we have long since learned that the Nigerians do not truly fight for Islam any more than the Biafrans fight for Jesus…”

  There were cries and grunts of agreement to that!

  “And now it seems they are not even trying to win this war—”

  “Because they can’t!”

  “Because they know they can’t!”

  “And neither can we!”

  “Oh yes we can!” I told them. “For our war is no longer Nigeria’s war. It never was. We are not mercenaries. We are jihadis! Our war is the Jihad that began when Mohammed, blessed be his name, received the Koran from Allah, fought by jihadis on many battlefields for a thousand years and more, the Jihad of Allah and His Faithful against Satan and his infidels for the soul of the world. That is our war, jihadis, and it will not end until our final victory or that of our brother Holy Warriors a thousand years from now brings the light of Islam to all the world and Allah’s Paradise upon the Earth, and no matter on what battlefield we find ourselves fighting in. That is the true Jihad if we make it so in our own hearts!”

  I raised my gun and fired a burst skyward.

  “Allahu Akbar!”

  To a man, my troops fired their own guns at the heavens, a salute, a challenge, a prayer, a promise.

  “ALLAHU AKBAR!” roared the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun.

  * * * *

  Words may have restored the will of the Ski Mask Jihadis to do deeds, but deeds worth doing in the name of Allah were in truth all but impossible to find.

  Now squads of jihadis crossed the Zone into northern Biafra daily at my command, but by now there was little worth destroying that could be destroyed. It was down to family compounds and even individual houses. It was down to bombing standing ruins. It was down to setting off explosions in fields of cattle. It was down to graffiti-bombing every wall intact enough to hold an image with the face of Osama the Gun and renewing it every time it was cleaned away to the point where the Biafrans gave up trying.

  The face of the Ski Mask Jihadi was everywhere. Towns and the smallest of villages were secured by Biafran troops but everything outside them was plastered with graffiti, in ruins, and deserted, for fear of the bombs that could go off anywhere at any time.

  “You are to be congratulated, I suppose, Osama,” Hamza told me, only half-sarcastically, “you have refined terrorism to its purest form.”

  I had taken to spending many hours in the “headquarters of the psychological warfare corps” watching television coverage of the war, such as it was, for neither the Major General nor I could find a much more productive way to pass the time.

  I supposed he was right. Never since we began had we been inflicting less actual damage, yet to judge from TV Biafra, never were the Biafrans north of the area under protection of the Americans more in terror of the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun. There was endless footage of the destruction and graffiti and almost as much of the heavy fortification of anything worth fortifying by dispirited and fearful looking Biafran troops. Biafra, or at least Biafran television, seemed obsessed with our “terrorism in its purest form,” indeed was our ally in spreading an atmosphere of fear.

  It made no sense to me. The Americans did nothing as long as the Nigerians stayed north of the Benué. So the Nigerian army now did nothing as long as the Biafrans did n
ot attempt to reoccupy the Zone. Biafra might have lost a large slice of its territory, but it was in less danger of losing the independence of what was left than at any time during the war.

  “Why such an atmosphere of gloom?” I asked Hamza. “Shouldn’t they be celebrating? Or at least trying to increase morale?”

  “Perhaps they’re preparing the Igbos for worse news than they’re showing now…”

  “Why would they be doing that…?”

  “Perhaps because the Biafran government knows something…”

  “Knows what?”

  Hamza shrugged. “Something everyone knows but they’d rather forget and maybe something they know that no one else knows but the Americans.”

  “Spare me your riddle.”

  “The Biafran junta that was put into power by the Americans would rather forget that everyone knows that the Americans will pull out the air power that keeps our army from marching all the way to the sea when there’s no more oil left worth sucking out of the ground. Maybe they now know when that’s going to happen and it’s soon.”

  “Those are two large maybes.”

  “Maybe,” Hamza said. He did not laugh. “But according to CNN, oil futures prices have been rising very rapidly the past month or so even though according to Al Jazeera world demand is even declining a bit.…”

  “This means what…?”

  Hamza shrugged again. “It means people who gamble on the oil futures market either believe the price of a barrel is going to go way up quite soon or know it is.… According to TV Biafra, Biafra has been supplying a quarter of American oil imports since they declared independence, their entire economy runs on the oil royalties the Americans are paying even at way below market prices, so when the Biafran fields run dry, the Biafran economy collapses, the Americans must greatly increase its imports from the Caliphate at market prices—”

  “—and the price goes way up.”

  Hamza nodded. “That’s the bad news for the Biafrans and the Americans,” he said. “That’s the good news for Nigeria and the Caliphate.”

  * * * *

  As it turned out, the news that stunned the world two weeks later was indeed good news for Nigeria and bad news for the Biafrans and the Americans, but disastrous news for the Caliphate.

  I did not hear it first on television. Hamza saw it live. So apparently did General Moustapha. It spread in minutes from the division commander to his officers and then like a firestorm throughout the encampment.

  The American Secretary of Agriculture had announced that the United States could no longer permit exports of wheat, rice, soy beans, corn, corn products, milk products, chicken, or beef. A third or more of the Caliphate’s entire food supply had been cut off without warning.

  I heard the news from three or four of my jihadis at the same time who had heard it from Nigerian soldiers and before I could even begin to digest what was happening myself, I was surrounded by jihadis expecting and practically demanding an explanation of what it meant.

  “The Americans said they could no longer feed the world.…”

  “They said they would continue to export pork.…”

  “Pork!”

  “Deliberate! A declaration of war against the Caliphate!”

  “Against Islam!”

  “It makes no sense. Surely the Caliphate won’t continue to send oil to the Americans now. The Great Satan has destroyed itself.”

  It made no sense to me either, and I told my men so, assured them that I would report back to them as soon as I could, and hastened through the turmoil of the camp to Hamza’s headquarters to see the television news reports myself. Hamza wasn’t there. I was told that he was in a meeting at division headquarters, and dashed over there.

  General Moustapha, Hamza, and half a dozen other officers were huddled before the four television monitors, all of them standing, Moustapha pacing back and forth.

  CNN was airing a recording of the American Secretary of Agriculture’s dire announcement.

  “…but cannot. The drought in the midwest of the past few years is not a temporary condition but a permanent climatic change and there are no realistic expectations that grain, corn, and soybean production will recover to previous levels. This affects livestock and milk production as well through feed grain shortfalls as well as the corn syrup essential to most processed foods. While the American people will not go hungry and will continue to enjoy a normal way of life with some adjustments, the American farmer is no longer able to produce surpluses for export and our reserves—”

  TV Biafra was broadcasting an old BBC documentary on the greenhouse effect warming, apparently in an attempt to validate the truth of the American claim in order to reassure the Igbos that what was happening was nothing political.

  United Nigeria Television was running the beginning of the American announcement. Al Jazeera was showing footage of lush fields of American wheat and corn, claiming that the Americans were lying, that the food embargo was an unprincipled act of economic warfare, and advising its viewers to stand by for a response from the Caliphate.

  I pulled Hamza aside. “What is happening?” I demanded.

  “I doubt if anyone here knows any more than you do, Osama,” he told me.

  “But in your opinion…?”

  “In my opinion, the Americans are probably telling the truth about their crop failures, the figures are there on the internet…but the Caliphate only sells them oil to buy their food, and there’s never been nearly enough of it being pumped out of Biafra to replace it.…”

  He shrugged. “It’s always been food for oil and oil for food, and I do not see how they can possibly expect to get away with this.…”

  Nor did anyone else during the half hour or so of confused speculation that followed. CNN and Al Jazeera then went live to Riyadh for a hardly unexpected reply from the Caliphate Council, though there was a certain breathlessness to CNN’s announcement that it would be delivered live by the Caliph himself.

  Caliph Ahmed bin Kadim was not much given to such appearances himself and these had almost always been recorded pronouncements or official fatwas. But there he was, in his white robe and untrimmed black beard going to gray, on two different televisions screens seen from two different camera angles, obviously live, and obviously ill at ease on both of them.

  “In the name of Allah the Beneficent,” he began stiffly, and I wondered whether his omission of “the Merciful” was deliberate.

  “For too many years we have imported the grain and meat and milk we could not grow for ourselves on the lands presently granted to us by Allah to sustain our vast population of the Faithful from the Americans and paid for these purchases with the earnings from the oil we sold to them to fuel their machineries. This has been a necessary transaction.”

  This much he seemed to be reading or perhaps had memorized; his countenance was wooden and he was evidently uncomfortable, the worldly ruler speaking of distastefully worldly matters. But then his face became more animated, his eyes fiery, and he gestured at the camera, at the television viewer, with his right hand and its index finger upraised as the Imam he also was.

  “But this was never a righteous transaction! This was never an honorable transaction! And now the Americans have reminded us that this was a dishonorable bargain! They have shown what a devilish bargain this really was by showing themselves as what they really are by taking the food from the mouths of Muslims, the mouths of Muslim women and children. By selling the Great Satan our oil to buy their food we have been fueling the machinery of their evil empire without which it could not function, without which its military might would be powerless.”

  The Caliph smiled, though there was no mirth in it. “So I say to the United States of America, thank you. Thank you for reminding Islam and the world of what you really are. Thank you for giving us back our honor. And I tell you that sooner will the peoples of the
Caliphate eat the dung of camels than the poisoned fruit of your accursed land, the land that Allah has turned to dust as just punishment for your evil depredations. And sooner will those camels pass through the eyes of a needle than will a single drop of our oil pass across the sea to fuel your engines of destruction. Allahu Akbar!”

  “Allahu Akbar!” I found myself shouting. “Death to the Great Satan!”

  Never before had I felt anything like love, even as a boy, for this stiff and distant figure, for never had he spoken what was in my heart, for what I had come here to fight for, to die for if Allah so willed it. At last the cause of the Caliphate and the cause of Islam itself, become one.

  To me this was a moment of the greatest clarity and sanity.

  Everyone else in General Moustapha’s headquarters regarded me as if I were a madman.

  “Don’t you see?” I told them. “This changes everything. This enables us to win the war right now.”

  All but Hamza and General Moustapha continued to regard me as demented, but Moustapha, who had long credited me as some sort of instinctive military savant, held up his hand for silence.

  “How so?” he demanded.

  In truth the war I believed could now be swiftly won was not the local war between United Nigeria and Biafra in whose outcome I no longer had any interest but Islam’s Jihad against the Great Satan.

  The Caliph had just deprived the United States of the bulk of its oil supply. The majority of what was left came from Biafra. If America was deprived of that now, it would be helpless. Its robot warships could not sail the seas, its robot planes could not fly, the factories that produced them would lie idle, it would be finished as the Great Satan. The world feared and hated the military and economic overlord of the Earth. The hatred might remain, but who would fear a country whose farmland had turned to dust, whose mighty military machinery was paralyzed and rusting away? America might remain a Satan but it would no longer be great.

  But this I could not say to these Nigerian officers. I must dissemble, though perhaps not exactly lie, for if I had my victory over the Great Satan with their aid, so would they have theirs over Biafra with mine.