Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  “America has been the greatest military power on Earth for a century, the greatest military power the world has ever known. Not even all the nations of the world combined could stand against us if we chose the path of conquest. But we have never done this. And the world knows it. And we will not do it now. If America were the Great Satan the Caliphate proclaims us to be, Islam would be no more, and Satan would rule the world. And the world knows this is true. And so do you.”

  And so I did. How could anyone who had faced that power in war deny it? How could those who had seen it on television deny it? How could we look across the border at that power confronting us now and deny it?

  “But the Caliphate has always sought territorial conquest. The Sons of Osama conquered Saudi Arabia and Pakistan by force of arms, by military coups, and that was how it began, and then a government that pretended to serve the holy cause of Islam used Islam as both an excuse and a means of gaining power over Kuwait, over the the Emirates, over Yemen, over Iraq, and Syria, and Egypt, and on and on, just as the Crusaders that you hate used Christianity in their wars of conquest against the lands of Islam in the Middle East. Deny that if you can!”

  And how could I? How could Osama the Gun deny that he and the beurs of France had been used and betrayed by the Caliphate in a futile attempt to bring Turkey into the fold? How could the veteran of a war against the Great Satan in Nigeria, in which Holy Warriors fought for Islam but to which the Caliphate would not commit its own troops deny it? How could the man who had been a loyal agent of the Caliphate, then pursued by assassins of that government deny it?

  This was truth. A terrible truth that I had long known but sought to conceal from myself, now ruthlessly revealed by the enemy. The Caliphate was not the Holy Rule of Allah. The Caliphate was just another government of men.

  “Your Caliph has brought you to the brink of your own destruction with a lie. You have been told that you confront the invincible forces of the United States as Holy Warriors for the cause of Islam. You do not. You have been sent to die so that the government of the Caliphate may reconquer land and oil. Nothing more. And America will now prove it to you.”

  The President paused, and when he went on, it was in the tone of a bureaucrat reading a policy paper.

  “America has withdrawn its recognition of the government of the Caliphate as the legitimate ruler of all the captive peoples now under its control. America believes that any government’s legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed as expressed by free democratic elections. The Caliphate does not and openly admits that it never has. The United States will therefore now act in the interest of both its national survival and its own highest ideals. The United States will recognize any province of the Caliphate that chooses to declare its independence and establish a democratic government and will protect that independence by whatever means necessary. And we will purchase its oil not at the punitive discount imposed on the undemocratic government of the Caliphate, but at full world market price.”

  How many among the half million truly understood this I do not know. There was a vast murmuring, faces turning to each other in incomprehension, a great babble of confusion. But I understood. This was diabolical genius, but genius nonetheless.

  And yet…and yet where was the injustice in it to be found?

  “Liberty, freedom, and prosperity, or death and the most terrible dishonor,” the American President proclaimed. “The choice is yours, jihadis, for your Caliph has left us no other. Here is our answer to his challenge. Disperse and there will be peace, liberty, and prosperity for those captive nations of the Caliphate who choose them, and even what then might remain under the rule remain of the Caliphate itself. Cross the border of free democratic Kuwait, and what you most love will be destroyed.”

  This he had proclaimed in the stern martial voice of a confident conqueror, but then his lower lip seemed to tremble as he spoke, and a reluctance to utter the words he had been given to deliver crept into his voice.

  “Disperse! Leave in peace! If you do not…if you do not…if you do not, if you try to cross the border…if you…we will be forced to do a terrible thing. We will use our power to teach a lesson that the world will never forget…We could destroy the population centers of the Caliphate. We will not do this. We are a merciful people…the Caliphate will be given forty-eight hours after the Kuwaiti border is crossed to evacuate the city, but after that, Mecca and everything within it will be destroyed.”

  By the scores of thousands, men fell to their knees, in horror, in shock, into the position for prayer, which came pouring out, in wailings, in cries of rage, in incoherent despair, in calls to Allah to strike this man dead. I found myself on my knees too, and took up the position, but I could find no words, struck dumb in my very heart.

  The Great Satan had fully unmasked itself.

  But there was worse to come.

  “And while this…this will be a great act of…of evil not only in your eyes, but in our own…in our own…”

  The American President stammered, fell silent, but then regained his voice to speak the most terrible words of all.

  “But the sin will be upon your souls, faithful Muslims! For the choice is yours, not ours! Will you trade your Holy City for acres of land and barrels of oil? The choice is yours, and now, one way or the other, you will be forced to make it. And now we will give you a sign that this is no empty threat. May your Allah send you the Light. And…and may God Bless America!”

  And the television screens went blank.

  And then there was light.

  But not the Light of Allah.

  Far away above the desert wastes of the Najd, far, far away and high above the southwestern horizon, the pale blue of the sky was rendered brighter than the desert sun by an immense flash of light momentarily blinding even at this great distance.

  There was a enormous scream of fear and horror and of even more terrible comprehension; blinded and terrified, I found myself running I know not where, smashing into people, staggering, howling, like an animal before a forest fire.

  Minutes later there was a clap of thunder like the end of the world and a mighty wind that knocked me blinded to my knees and I found myself gasping for breath within a roiling cloud of sand.

  When vision cleared, I could barely make out men in their scores of thousands, rubbing their eyes, coughing, fleeing but unable to truly flee in all directions, like a great swirl of dry leaves in that terrible wind, yes, like a defeated army disintegrating before an irresistible and pitiless foe.

  And when the mighty sirocco blew the sandstorm by, there on the horizon was the sign of that defeat, a towering mushroom pillar cloud defiling the very heavens of Allah.

  CHAPTER 37

  Half a million Holy Warriors of Islam had not merely been defeated, but dispersed and humiliated, and not in battle or even by fear of death at the hands of overwhelming American military power, but by the Word alone The Word of America sworn upon the ultimate worldly power placed in their hands by Satan.

  The final confrontation between Islam and the Devil had come and gone. Islam had been defeated and Satan had won.

  How could this have happened? Why would Allah have abandoned His Faithful? Surely He must have, for surely Satan could not be a greater power than Allah.

  Could he?

  The jihadis had fled in panic in all directions and no directions in particular, spreading out like a barrel of oil suddenly dumped on the desert sands, but when the wind had abated and the distant nuclear cloud began to dissolve, the mindless terror began to abate and dissolve with them, and small groups began to form, coalescing into a leaderless and listless stream of retreat south and east, away from the American forces on the Kuwaiti border, further away from the distant nuclear ground zero, and towards the tent city near the coast where the march had begun.

  The march north had been arduous but buoyed by the spirit of the Jihad,
fatiguing and taxing to the flesh, but exhilarating to the soul. This was a horror, a terrible retreat of hundreds of thousands of defeated souls trudging through a sere landscape under a mocking sky where the only cloud was that of the gloom that enveloped us.

  The water trucks and tankers accompanied us as before so that few or none died of thirst, but whether this was indifference on the part of the crews or the ireful imagination making it appear so, the ration seemed more niggardly than before, and every mouthful embittered by the taste of oil. The food ration supplied free by the Caliphate was certainly more meager, and what the vendors sold to supplement it was no longer sold at cost.

  The military transport began to drift away, and with it many of those who had come in their own private vehicles or on their animals, leaving the commandeered buses and trucks from the cities and towns. Whereas those who had ridden the day before had given way in a brotherly manner to those who had walked, now men shoved and fought for what places remained on what transport there was.

  No one wore the mask of Osama the Gun now. The claimants to the mantle of the Madhi had disappeared into the disconsolate mass. Mullahs and Imams chanted verses from the Koran continually, but they fell on the ears as the mournful choruses of a dirge, and when we halted for the five daily prayers facing Mecca, it had become little more than a ritual and empty words that touched not our broken hearts.

  As the days wore on, the supply of food for sale dwindled away, the rations supplied by the Caliphate were insufficient, and what was already a funereal procession of the soul threatened to become a death march.

  And then, on the morning of the fifth day, scores of American Vultures arrived from the north to finish us off, or so it first seemed, and there were those who tried to flee, but not many, for there was no place to go and nowhere to hide.

  The Vultures circled low over the march. Slung beneath them were things like huge fat metal sausages. But they were not dropped to blow us to pieces. Instead they opened up and out dropped thousands of crate-sized packets deploying small parachutes. When they fell among us and curiosity overcame fear to tear them open they were found to be packets of food.

  Certified halal!

  There were many shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Praise be to Allah!”

  But I did not join in. How could I?

  It was the mercy of the Great Satan that kept us alive. It was the Americans who dropped food to their defeated enemy each day for the remainder of the march. What did this mean? What were they saying? Was it true mercy? Was it some strangely diabolical taunt?

  Most the men I had march north with had dispersed and disappeared into the chaos when the bomb had gone off, but Kalil Basanjadi and I had chanced to stay together, and remained companions on the march south.

  The second day the Americans made their food drop, I remembered the words of Mohammed Karzai, and repeated them to Kalil.

  “Remember what Karzai said about the Americans? A strange people. Who could slaughter from the air without a second thought yet treat wounded enemies as if they were their own sons…?”

  Kalil nodded. “Do you remember what he answered when I asked him why he had come to this jihad?”

  I shook my head.

  “To learn what is really in their hearts,” the Sufi reminded me.

  “And this has revealed it truly?” I replied dubiously.

  “They have revealed what sleeps within the heart of even the evilest of men, Kalil told me. Whether this means it has been awakened in the heart of your Great Satan is another matter entirely. Your Caliph believed he could do that with clever strategy, or force them to reveal that they were nothing but soulless slaves of Satan, and accomplished neither.”

  He gestured towards the closest of the crowds of men scrambling and contending over the American food packets, and with an opening of his arms, by extension all that what had been a community of the Faithful on a Holy Mission had become.

  “And all he succeeded in revealing was this!”

  “The defeat of Islam…” I muttered disconsolately.

  The Sufi shook his head. “Islam has not been defeated,” he declared. “Men have been defeated. The Caliphate has been defeated. The American President spoke truth and that truth defeated a government of men. But Islam cannot be defeated, for it has always slept in the souls of all men, awaiting its awakening. The mercy of the Americans has proven that at least.”

  He sighed. “But those who have been awakened can certainly be put back to sleep. The Americans have proven that too.”

  * * * *

  When the march finally staggered back into the tent city, the Caliphate government was in no mood to play host to half a million men for very long. During the last days of our retreat, the Americans had made much of its food drops to us on CNN, and particularly on Al Jazeera, contrasting their magnanimity in victory to the Caliphate’s mean and mingy provisioning in defeat. Dubai and Qatar had already seceded, placed themselves under the protection of the Americans, and made their lucrative deals to sell oil to what only the Caliphate was still calling the Great Satan, and the other emirates were about to follow.

  It was announced that the food and water supplies would only continue for another ten days, after which the tent city would be taken down, and all who remained would be on their own.

  Those of the former jihadis who were Caliphate citizens quickly melted away back towards whence they came. Ships, boats, and dhows were already arriving in droves at the ports to evacuate those who were not, most of whom had no desire to remain at the scene of the catastrophe.

  But where was I to go? What was I to do? I had some funds that still remained from what I had saved of my Nigerian officer’s pay and the promise of a retirement pension, and perhaps I could return to Nigeria and pursue a military career, but the very thought filled me with depression and disgust. I could slink back to the family homestead but as a son who had disappeared and who would have to explain where and why, and whose education and training fitted me for nothing other than enlistment in the Caliphate military, assuming they would accept, rather than arrest, a man who a search of the records would reveal to have been Osama the Gun.

  I had no means of earning a living. no wife or prospect of gaining one, no mission left to sustain even hope, become a stranger in my own land and my life seemed over before it had even begun.

  The only person I had to talk to was the Sufi, but I could hardly call him a friend or confidant, since I had confided nothing to him of who I really was, not even that I was entitled to the title Al Hadj. But we had spoken of the matters that troubled my spirit, and I had found wisdom in his words if not peace, and of an evening after the sunset prayer, I cautiously ventured to seek something from him, I knew not what.

  “You seem, like me, uncertain as to where you will go to from here…”

  Kalil shrugged. “The Hadj begins four months from now, I have never made the pilgrimage, I am not a man of means, and I am debating with myself as to whether I should return to Iran now, or try to remain here long enough to become a hadji. I can’t really afford to leave and then return.”

  He gave me a speculative look. “But you are a citizen of the Caliphate, Ahmed bin Abdullah, why have you not gone home with the rest of them?”

  The tent city was more than half deserted now, and the Caliphate had already taken down most of the tents. The food vendors had all gone. Debris and uncollected garbage were everywhere. The dismal defeated scene mirrored the state of my soul. How much could I tell this man? How could I tell him anything without telling him everything?

  We sat outside one of the remaining tents which we had all to ourselves. The only humans visible were a few distant silhouettes scattered about the ruins of what had been. The brilliant desert sky was full of bright stars, and pristine and clear. We were quite alone. What was there to really fear? Had not the worst already happened?

  “T
he truth is my name is not Ahmed,” I admitted softly, “but Osama.…”

  “There are a hundred thousand Osamas in the Caliphate at the very least,” said Kalil, “and even that Frenchman who insisted on taking the name when it was not his own. Why have you hid such a common name behind another?”

  “You won’t believe me if I tell you…” I muttered.

  “Try me,” said Kalil. “We Sufis value a well-told tale, so tell me your story, whether it is truly yours or not.”

  “I am Osama the Gun.”

  Kalil laughed. “What, yet another one!” he cried. And I could not help but laugh with him.

  And that laugh opened something within me. “I’m the real one,” I said.

  “You all say that!”

  And we laughed together again.

  “I really am Osama the Gun. Al Hadj Osama the Gun. This I swear on the name of Allah, on the Koran, on the Holy Ka’aba, on anything else that is holy. And unlike the others, I never proclaimed who I was, but hid it, did I not?”

  Kalil’s face became serious. Intent. “Tell me why.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “Tell your tale,” Kalil insisted.

  And so I did, haltingly, guardedly at first, leaving out the names he had no need to know, but speaking ever more freely as I went on, as the Sufi sat there regarding me silently without displaying any emotion, any reaction, as I imagined that a priest behind the grid of a Catholic confessional booth might.

  Indeed it became such a confession, or so I assumed from what little I knew of the Christian rite, like the lancing of an angry boil festering in secret on my soul.

  But when it was over, I was given no cleansing penance to perform, no absolution. Kalil just nodded once and sat there without speaking, constraining me to break the long silence.

  “Do you believe me, Kalil?”

  “I believe that you believe this tale,” he told me. “And so it matters what I believe, for the story of his own life that a man believes is the true story of his soul. And yours is a good story, Al Hadj Osama the Gun. The story of a good man.”