Tehran Decree
By
James Scorpio
Published By Smashwords
Copyright © James Scorpio 2010
This book is copyright under the Bern Convention
No reproduction without permission
All rights reserved
Published by Jamscorp Electrobooks 2010
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Disclaimer
This book is a work of fiction, characters, descriptions
and situations incidental in the text are therefore not
intended to slur, or defame in anyway, individuals,
organisations or government authorities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Edwina Anne Whitworth for her assistance in the preparation of this novel
PROLOGUE
The government had not done any better since the dismissal of Clement Chester, the Australian New South Wales commissioner of police, in fact, they had well and truly stuffed things up. The latest news broadcast had signaled the release of most hostages, but not the US president, which is what the terrorists wanted anyway. As far as Chester was concerned, the authorities were a lot of limp dicks pissing in the wind, and he was glad to be out of it in his forced resignation.
Although Chester relished his early retirement, the circumstances surrounding it had left a bitter taste in his mouth. Vengeance was a cruel agitator and would not let go of his addled brain. They had humiliated him, all of them, after forty loyal years of service to the police force and the country he loved, the very last thing he needed in his twilight years was a ready made set of political demons.
Every night he would go through the Sydney cross city tunnel fiasco, reenacting the whole damned thing in his head, creating better scenarios that would have worked had he been given another chance, but one could not rewind the past, life wasn’t a rehearsal for something better, it just happened and that was it, take it or leave it.
But he was fortunate in some ways, he had what some psychiatrists might call a split personality, which gave him the ability to divide his personality in half, so that one half was unaware what the other half was doing. Two separate people in the same body; the equivalent of psychological Siamese twins, but even this had its problems.
He suffered long and terrible periods of recrimination due to internal conflict between the two halves, which frequently lead to severe depression.
The two halves were separate all right, but they were not water tight, and they kept knocking on each others doors looking for trouble. As soon as he had closed one door, the other opened, and he found himself struggling to keep both doors closed at the same time. On the few occasions he achieved this it was absolute bliss. The world went away and heavenly peace descended, but it had a short life span, and the demons would come back with a vengeance. It was a contention between some psychiatrists that the struggle between the left and right brain hemispheres was the cause of many mental disorders.
Chester had smoked marijuana cigarettes to alleviate it, but this often made the depression even worse, and of late, suicide had entered his mind to end the terrible struggle and unbearable dark nights.
Strangely, the actual thought of committing suicide temporarily relieved his depression, but it always came back when the brain was cheated of actual reality, it was as if relief could only be satisfied by the physical act of suicide itself.
He pointed the remote, sitting upright and switching through the TV channels, in his favourite patchwork armchair; it was a present from long gone mates and a survivor from his training days at the police academy.
He continued to change the news channels picking out reruns of the worst cases of police ineptitude during the tunnel siege and verbally criticised them between gulps of beer and long draws on his marijuana cigarette. Chester spent most of his free time in his shed away from his wife, so that he could practice and sustain all the bad habits she so despised in him. Most of his evenings were spent this way in a drug induced stupor, enhanced with draughts of alcohol. He did have his lucid periods, during which he carried out all the things he’d missed out on during his drug induced haze. Unfortunately, the distinction between the two periods was becoming dimmer and dimmer, and he was vaguely aware that unless he went cold turkey very soon and stayed that way; it would be the end of him. God had made a complex being all right, but the management part of the brain simply wasn’t competent enough to control it. Had the almighty unwittingly created a monster, a sophisticated Frankenstein monster conjured up from the left over molecules of the universe. Chester, although a roughly hewn male externally, was a delicate and sophisticated thinker in his lucid moments, which unfortunately, were becoming rarer with each day that passed. But he had the forethought and insight to know his wife, Rosey Chester, was now taking the brunt of his gross misdemeanors.
Rosey had taken to charity work and community volunteering in a desperate bid to relieve her frustration, and to secretly get away from her husband of thirty years. He had become all the things she detested in a man; he was bull necked, overweight, scarred with wrinkles and unbearably irascible most of the time. He never dressed formerly anymore, it was either worn jeans or drill shorts, matched by a grubby polo top.
On this particular evening a Ladies Club progressive international dinner was in progress, and it was the sort of thing Rosey Chester loved. The lucky ladies as she referred to her companions, went from one members house to another, tasting a different international dish at each house. The chosen country happened to be France and Rosey had spent many hours cooking French cuisine with all the trimmings. She just loved the French -- classy and culturally savvy, they were everything Clement wasn’t, and she would have given anything to play host to her ladies group. But her house would not be on the list of venues visited, courtesy of Clement who hated visitors impinging on his private life, and in any case, Rosey was ashamed of him. She made a point of prolonging such occasions for as long as possible so that Clement would hopefully be asleep in bed by the time she arrived home.
It was two thirty a.m. by the time the last morsels of her French cuisine and that of her companions had been consumed and Rosey decided enough was enough. Clement should be well and truly tucked up in bed by now. It took nearly another hour before things were cleaned up and pots and pans were assigned to their rightful owners.
Rosey drove the short distance back home and arrived there at three-thirty p.m., and on this occasion, she pulled in the drive way cursing -- the outside light was off, but there was a dull yellow glow in Clement’s shed, with fluctuating light flashes in the side window.
Clement had obviously fallen asleep again in front of the telly, it was just one of a battery of irritating habits he had developed since his abrupt retirement. Rosey was at the end of her tether and had begun to realise that this awkward, drug addicted recluse, was a mere shadow of the man she had married all those years ago.
His habits had been largely hidden during his days at work and had now become fly blown and out of all proportion. Every word he uttered, on the rare occasions when he chose to talk to her, was full of irony and irksome platitudes about the human race and its inevitable decline.
She had agreed with him on n
umerous occasions but that was never enough for Clement, he wanted to spend evenings discussing, and arguing, over the same points day after day, week after week.
Rosey slammed the door on the Holden Commodore hoping this would wake him, then wrenched the shed door open. The flickering brightness of the TV screen matched against the darkness of the rear of the shed confused her and she peered intently at the old armchair. It was several moments before she realised Clement wasn’t sitting there; she looked beyond, to the rear of the shed.
She was met by an incomprehensible void of shifting forms, which refused to be focussed into a cohesive whole; the scarcity of the pervading light seemed to be creating misleading images of its own.
Shouting his name in frustration she switched on the main light at the side of the door. Three seconds passed before the imagery registered in her cerebellum.
She stiffened in horror; Clement was strung up to the roof of the shed, his head pulled crazily to one side by a hemp rope tied in a rough knot around his neck, a deathly gray pallor bathed his twisted features. Sputum and saliva streaked with blood, dribbled from his open mouth, his expressionless eyes protruded from a bloated misshapen face; she wanted to vomit and cry in the one breath.
An old stool lay on its side a mere six inches from his feet -- once again he had stuffed things up -- botching his own death by slowly strangling himself, instead of the swiftness and finality of a clean spinal severance.
A severe pang of conscience surged through her brain, perhaps she had been too hard on him, her strict upbringing had often resulted in futile arguments, which Clement always lost on moral grounds, causing him great humiliation. He had hidden his despair in self abusive drinking and drug taking. Her heart softened for the first time in years; seeing him for the last time; in this, the ultimate state of self humiliation.
She knew under the depraved behavior patterns he was a good man at heart, who had been knocked from pillar to post, smitten with bad habits he couldn’t control and chewed to pieces by a politically correct system gone mad.
She looked up at him one final time in a prolonged, wistful gaze, and held his cold hand between hers, trying desperately to warm it up -- just a little.
‘Why Clement...why?’
Chapter One
TWO YEARS EARLIER
Lexton, South Australia
Few people would want to be stranded four hundred kilometers from civilisation in the South Australian outback, but the site had been well chosen. The distance was just enough to be isolated and out of sight of an over quizzical public, but still amenable to transport services from the big city. In this sense Lexton Detention Centre was both remote and yet still accessible. The area was dry, sandy-brown dessert, with random dabs of dark green salt bush stretching as far as the eye could see. A merciless sun poured its energy unremittingly over the barren landscape.
It was impossible, as well as highly undesirable, to focus on the penetrating harshness of the solar disc, but the celestial body made up for her insensitivity. At the end of the day as the incandescent disk touched the earth’s horizon, a shimmering display of light and shade erupted. It wavered through intense yellow to glorious gold. Majestically, the gold coalesced to a deep blood red, the display held for perhaps four to five minutes, then dramatically plunged into the earth creating total blackness. Some of the local aboriginals looked upon it as the quenching of the hot sun by the coldness of the South Australian night.
Port Augusta residents described the sunsets as absolutely stunning; like being on the barren moon of a strange planet and watching the sun being eclipsed by the curvature of the moon.
Habib Sharazi had spent the last three years in South Australia, but had never seen any of this. In fact most of the detainees at Lexton detention camp had never seen a South Australian sunset. They were always moved around the camp in closed vehicles and the windows of the compound were all built inwards to prevent contact with the outside.
Most family compounds consisted of round sheet metal, demountable buildings, without windows, reminiscent of circular stone age huts. Adding to the unsavory properties of the environment was an eight metre razor wire fence surrounding the entire compound. Any observer outside the camp would have been perplexed by this, as there were never any detainees to be seen. Inmates were kept locked up all day and deprived of most normal facilities.
It was a bright morning during roll call when Habib Sharazi saw his first chance to escape the ugliness of Lexton. Nothing could be as inhibiting and soul destroying as metal back to back buildings which cut out all semblance of Australiana. The great southern country had much more to offer and being in the dessert without food or water was no deterrent. At least he could die having experienced a modicum of the earthiness and freedom that was the Australian outback...it was worth the risk.
The genesis of a new day infused him with the power to be free whatever the cost. A sudden rush at the razor wire fence, throwing all caution to the winds, actually seemed a rational thing to do at the start of a brand new day. Such rashness was the prerogative of the younger man and it was a natural desire of the human psyche, but it had to be controlled or it could perish in blood, pain, and tears, at the hands of brutal security guards.
He had been through the early morning monitoring many times and had noted what he thought was a possible flaw in the accounting procedure. It was a stand by your beds routine, while the security guard counted and checked off names on a clip board list. Such routines inevitably became boring to both the guard and inmate, but the most interesting thing about the procedure was that it was conducted by one man; such was their confidence in the deterrent effect of isolation and the razor wire fence.
Positioned at the end of the inmate lineup he could just see a portion of the Australian guards head and sleeve with the large initials ACM stitched across it. He was animatedly trying to communicate with a new Arab inmate without much success.
Sharazi knew that ACM meant Australasian Correctional Management and it was part of a partnership called Australasian Correctional Services (ACS), half of which was owned by the giant Australian firm of Hessan, with the other half controlled by a private American security company, run by an American multimillionaire.
They were hand in glove with the US and Australian governments. Living and making money out of the misfortunes of displaced illegal immigrants. It seemed somehow immoral even when confronted with the excesses of militant Islam. He had often wondered how he could ever live as a free Muslim surrounded by the companies of such mighty Western infidels.
The ACM guard was further distracted by the Arab’s wife who pulled determinedly at his sleeve while shouting at him in Arabic and pointing to the check board listing.
Sharazi took his chance slipping quietly behind the row of inmates and out through the half closed door. It was yet another contemptuous assumption through familiarity, that the guard had not bothered to lock the door. Sharazi deftly eased himself out of the door and sprinted across the open ground. It was his first good view of the Australian outback, but it was demarcated by a barrier of light and steel, which ran off into the distance, curving round into a great circle totally enclosing his small world. It was a taste of freedom -- but it is was only a sip from a poisoned vessel.
He searched in vain for a weak point in the barbed fence line. The light glinting off the razor wire partially blinding him as he ran, skirting the metal thorn encrusted spirals -- then a gap of intense light emanated from one side of the fence -- was it a way out? Had Allah given him a signal?
A flurry of raised voices echoed behind him driving him on. He plunged blindly forward, his mouth dry with exertion from the hot dessert air. The loss of precious bodily fluids increased as he began heaving and sweating, with every muscle aching -- there had to be a way through the infernal steel barrier.
He spurred himself on even harder, even though his body began to rebel -- his muscles were twinging and full of pain -- threatening to seize up.
The hal
o of light grew more intense and he surged towards it -- like a moth diving towards an open flame. It had to be a break in the fence wire. Allah was goading him on to freedom. Then something strange happened, as if he had broken through the barrier, all the pain abruptly disappeared and his body felt like it were floating on a cloud. Fine detail disappeared even with both eyes wide open, sweat stung his eye sockets, and his receptors could only register blurred shapes.
The blinding light totally enveloped him and he stopped abruptly, as if constrained by an invisible hand. A paralysing force abruptly gripped his torso and a burning sensation stabbed at his neck and face.
His body swung freely as if suspended in a heavenly hammock -- it was then he noticed his body was being constrained by bloodied metal barbs.
The pain rudely returned biting into his brain, he could not open his eyes, then he cried out, as spattering red liquid ran down his face and pooled in his lap. The guards dragged him from the wire -- a crumpled heap of deep gashes and bloody streaks -- a paramedic quickly entered the scene and set about patching the gaping wounds in his arms and face.
‘How bad is he?’stutted an out of breath senior security officer.
‘I’m sorry sir, but he’ll need immediate surgery,’ one of the security officers peered warily at the razor wire...each barb was a means of cutting one’s wrist or throat, and there were thousands of them all around the camp perimeter. He lowered his head in a futile attempt to hide a shameful grimace.
‘What the fucking hell are we doing to these retched people?’ the chief officer blurted out in a flurry of emotion; the paramedic responded, gazing alarmingly at the razor wire,
‘I don’t know about that sir, but I do know one thing -- we haven’t thought this through. These people are very familiar with pain and suffering, so a few rolls of razor wire isn’t going to bother them too much.’
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