Sword of Allah

by David Rollins

  ‘Emir, Emir,’ said the young man, out of breath after having sprinted back and forth between the doctor’s hut and the beach a couple of times. ‘The doctor says it’s ninety-nine percent pure!’

  Duat had randomly checked the contents of more than twenty of the wrapped packages and was in the process of recounting the stack of red bricks a third time. ‘…one hundred and sixty-five, one hundred and sixty-six, and the package with Rahim makes it one hundred and sixty-seven.’ Duat nodded, satisfied.

  ‘You must sign for it,’ said the toothless old captain, presenting Duat with a piece of paper held to a clipboard. Duat almost laughed. Couriers were the same no matter what the parcel. The paper was covered in a script Duat was unfamiliar with, but its purpose was plain. Once signed, Duat couldn’t complain to the general that he had not received what he’d paid for.

  ‘Did you say, ninety-nine percent pure?’ Duat asked the messenger, the number filtering through his preoccupation with the captain and his paperwork. The young man nodded vigorously. Duat beamed broadly and slapped the captain on the back. He’d thought this part of Kadar’s plan would be difficult and dangerous but, apart from an uncomfortable visit to Myanmar, it had been trouble free.

  The captain snapped at one of his men who, in turn, shouted at the rest of the crew. They retired to their launch, a military-style RHIB powered by a phenomenally large outboard motor. The captain gestured Duat over with a wave of his hand. ‘Be careful, my friend,’ he said to Duat when he reached the side of the boat. ‘There are eyes everywhere.’ He flung back an old canvas on the bottom of the launch.

  Duat’s eyes went wide. ‘Hendra, come here,’ he said.

  The technician, who had been sullen and withdrawn since the failure of the test flight, trying to work out what might have gone wrong, had to be prodded by one of the other men.

  ‘Hendra, Emir wants you,’ said the man, tapping Hendra’s shoulder with the flat of his machete blade.

  Hendra pulled himself up and walked over to the launch.

  ‘We were shooting at sharks half an hour out when this flew past, low,’ said the captain. ‘One of my men brought it down with a lucky shot.’ Beneath the canvas lay the sodden remains of Hendra’s drone, a wing and part of a smashed fuselage. ‘I think you should know…it was on a direct course for your camp,’ he said, a look of concern on his face.

  Rahim released the tourniquet and lay back on his bed as a surge he’d never known before flowed through his body. He’d administered what he’d believed to be a very small dose, but the drug was enormously powerful, lifting him within a handful of seconds beyond pain and into the heavens themselves.

  ‘Abd’al, Abd’al. Come quick,’ said Etti as she burst through the door. ‘You must see this.’

  Rahim wondered what could be so important.

  ‘The pigs!’

  The pigs, yes, now that could be important. He leapt off the bed most unlike a terminally ill man in his last few months of life and dashed out the door. In yesterday’s experiment, he had added one milligram of the substance to three litres of water, which had been absorbed by two kilos of rice. The rice was then fed to one of the pigs, a sow, and a very large one at that. The sow was then admitted to a pen with three males, all of whom had been denied food for four days.

  Rahim raced to the pen and was astonished by what he saw. The large sow was dead and, as expected, had been largely devoured by the hungry males who had slit her from anus to breastbone. But the males, also, were dead. All from one single carefully measured milligram of the substance; less than a drop. The agent was as lethal as reported. Truly, it was a weapon of massive and indiscriminate destruction. Rahim’s mind drifted to the concrete encased, stainless-steel canisters now sharing his quarters: twenty litres of the very blood of Death himself.

  Manila, Philippines

  Skye Reinhardt lay awake in the early hours of the morning. She’d been living with the guilt for several weeks and the stress of it was starting to show, the occasional fine line between her eyebrows now a deep and permanent fixture on the face that met her in the mirror. That guilt was like some kind of wild animal she couldn’t shake, stalking her, leaving her staring into the dark, fearful of closing her eyes.

  Jeff was the source of that guilt, or rather, her feelings for him were. The frequency of his visits had started to increase to the point where he was now flying into town every few days just to be near her. For a while, she’d managed to convince herself that she was in control of the relationship, but two factors were forcing her to realise the truth. The first was that she resented the existence of a Mrs Kalas down in Sydney. Jeff had recently let slip that he’d had sex with her. Skye argued long and hard about that. She was incensed. What? You had sex with your wife!? No matter how vehemently she argued the point she just hadn’t been able to make him understand how wrong that was. The other disturbing fact was that Skye had been unable to tell him who her employer was, not the full truth, anyway. She’d only managed a version of it, that she was an academic researching the stability of the Filipino government amidst the rise of Islamist fundamentalism throughout the region.

  At first, Skye had successfully managed to convince herself that the subterfuge was a necessary aspect of spycraft, that she was working undercover here. But the reality – and this truly frightened her – was that Jeff would simply stop seeing her if he knew she was CIA. He hadn’t told her this directly, of course, but she knew it nonetheless. Why? Because he was somehow involved in the bombing of the US Embassy in Jakarta! At some point Skye had not been able to identify, she had had to make a choice: a relationship with Jeff, or loyalty to her country. The choice hadn’t seemed as stark as that but, as she lay in her room watching the ceiling fan slowly rotate, the truth of it struck her as inescapable.

  When the embassy was bombed, every CIA station in South East Asia had been put on full alert. Langley screamed that the perpetrators of the murderous act would have to be run down and damn fast. As expected, the politicians and the press back home immediately and aggressively began to question the CIA’s capabilities – or lack of them – because of its failure to pre-empt the attack. Shit flows downhill. This unhappiness had been passed on down the line and the Manila bureau had received its fair share. The perpetrators of the heinous act had to have had a base, and the island of Mindanao, where the US was already fighting a dirty little war alongside Filipino regulars, was high on the list of probable locations for it.

  Skye took several deep breaths and then forced them noisily through her open mouth, hyperventilating like an athlete before a race. The shock of seeing the dartboard on that first morning, when the field of suspects had been narrowed by some unknown piece of intelligence, was still very real within her. She had arrived late to work because Jeff was in town. He’d taken her to dinner, a French restaurant and very expensive – of course. They’d had champagne, Veuve, their special thing, and then they’d gone home to his hotel room to fuck – no, to make love. It was more than just a physical thing by then.

  It was ten past nine the next morning when she had woken, feeling bleary but sated, with the deep satisfaction in the base of her spine that only came from great sex. She had come three times and was proud of it. She remembered joking with herself in the taxi ride on the way in whether she should send a memo around about what she was getting from her man but, of course, decided against it. The office was too tense since the bombing of the embassy for that kind – or any kind – of frivolity. So instead she’d gone straight to her desk, put her bag down, then headed to the kitchen to fill her jug at the cooler. Fortunately the kitchen was empty because then she didn’t have to explain why she suddenly dropped her jug, sending shards of glass to the four corners of the room. The dartboard beside the water cooler had been modified, rearranged, the pictures culled. Even the haunting picture of Bin Laden with that oddly gentle Mona Lisa smile had been taken down. Now there were only two photos pinned to the board. If she was not mistaken – and she wasn’t –
they were the men she’d seen that day, poolside with Jeff. ‘Prime Suspects – Jakarta’ said the laser-printed headline below the mug shots.

  The manhunt was being conducted out of Australia, the Canberra bureau. The coordinator for the hunt was a Ms Gia Ferallo, the deputy assistant station chief down there. Skye had hurriedly written down the deputy director’s direct phone number on a piece of scrap paper, then cleaned up the glass on the floor before returning to her cubicle. The rest of the day was vague in her memory, probably because she spent most of it staring at the wall, replaying in her mind every moment she’d spent with Jeff, winnowing it, searching for anything of substance that was suspicious. Jeff was a moneyman, that much she knew. And he was married – twice. Skye realised that she had very quickly become far more preoccupied with Jeff’s marital situation than his relationship with the two obviously very dangerous men. She had failed in her stated objective to get inside his guard. Instead, she was getting herself laid.

  Skye turned on her bedside light and pulled out the two laser prints of the suspects from under her mattress. One of them, Kadar Al-Jahani, was dead, killed in Israel according to office circulars and confirmed by news reports. A large red X had been drawn on his mug shot on the dartboard. The other one, the man known as Duat, stared at her with flat black eyes above high cheekbones, the skin shiny where it pulled tightly across them. His lips were thin and he wore a scraggly beard. A happy thought occurred to her: if both the men were killed, would her relationship with Jeff slip into the irrelevant basket? No, she decided, after a heartbeat of hope. There was only one course of action open to her, but she knew that it would end her career at the CIA and possibly earn her a small cell in Leavenworth. The only question unanswered in her mind was whether she would confront Jeff first.

  Flores, Indonesia

  Hendra danced up and down, whooping and yelling. Duat swivelled his head as the drone flew overhead, watching it track down the beach. Unbelievable. The plane had completed its pre-programmed flight plan just as Hendra had said it would, a circle that took it more than fifty kilometres out over the sea. Duat patted Hendra on the back as the former air force communications man took control of the plane through the small transmitter. It behaved just as if a pilot sat at the controls, only the pilot in this case would have to be impossibly small as the cockpit was only big enough in size for a piglet.

  ‘Now we begin trials with Sword of Allah,’ Hendra said.

  Duat smiled. Yes, Khalid bin Al-Waleed, the famous general known as the Sword of Allah, who conquered so many lands and peoples in the time of the Prophet, and in His name. ‘That is a good name, Hendra. Kadar Al-Jahani would have approved. We’ll paint “Sword of Allah” on the side of the drone and bless it with prayers and song.’

  ‘Thank you, Emir,’ said Hendra as he turned to sprint up the beach to collect the aircraft just landed.

  Duat allowed himself some degree of satisfaction. Plans had actually progressed far better than he ever would have expected since the death of Kadar. Much of that, Duat readily admitted to himself, was largely because of Kadar’s planning and foresight. The strike against the embassy had achieved many good things – secured their support and swelled their ranks.

  A sudden sharp explosion from the encampment made Duat flinch. The screams began as he sprinted up the embankment and into the camp. It had come from the weapons range. Duat rounded the hut where lectures on explosives were given, and pushed through a growing knot of men and women shouting and crying over the remains of three men who’d been harvesting Composition B from claymore mines. Obviously, some of the men had been careless and all three had paid the price with their lives, the mine’s seven hundred small ball bearings macerating them into human mince. The sight annoyed Duat. They could ill afford to lose three lives so pointlessly. One of the dead had also been amongst the most experienced of the explosives handlers, personally trained by Kadar Al-Jahani himself. He would be missed.

  Kipchak Khan Janiberg, the Mongol Khan of the Golden Hordes, screamed at the top of his lungs so that his own men cowered in fear behind him. His anger rang in his own ears and his horse shifted about nervously, its hooves scrabbling for purchase in the greasy mud. He again cursed the delays forced on his army by the weather and by the sickness. These delays had allowed news of the Khan’s approaching force to race ahead of the forward companies, bringing stories of the horror set to be unleashed on the people of this Italian outpost. So the peasants, merchants and noblemen alike had time to run for their lives and cringe like frightened dogs behind the city’s forbidding concentric grey walls.

  The Khan looked up at those implacable walls and in frustration called aloud to the gods to deliver the city of Caffa on the shores of the Black Sea to his army. For three long years they had surrounded it and yet the city was still denied him. The Khan snatched at the bridle and his white horse wheeled about. One of the men beside him, a general no less, slipped off his mount and landed heavily on the ground, unconscious. Kipchak did not have to wonder long at the reason for the fall, for the characteristic swelling the size and colour of a rotten onion stood out black and shiny from the man’s neck. Frightened by the proximity of the disease, where a man vomited blood and his fingers, toes and penis turned black before death came, the Khan dug his spurs into the horse’s thighs and galloped off towards the camp.

  Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim found the general later on his rounds. He was one of many charged with the gathering of the hundreds who died daily, for disposal. The wagon behind him swayed precariously in the mud, overloaded with corpses for the cleansing fires. There were some on the pile who were still alive, but only just, but the Khan’s household had made the decision that, for the good of all, those close to death should be taken to its bosom. Rahim looked down at the general, a great man by all accounts, a leader, a conqueror of foreign lands and people, laid low by the swelling disease, and soon for the fires. The irony of it made him laugh, for he, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim, was a nobody from a poor family with no land and no prospects save for the opportunity provided by war, and yet here he was, strong and alive, a conqueror of death itself. A survivor. He directed his assistants to pick up the general and throw him on the wagon. But the general was a big man with plenty of meat still on his carcase, despite the long campaign, and it took three to lift him. Rahim took him by the shoulders and lifted up his head.

  ‘Send me to mine enemies,’ the general said breathlessly.

  It was a strange thing to say and Rahim asked him what he meant. Of course, the general was delirious and couldn’t understand anything Rahim said to him, but he nevertheless kept repeating, ‘Send me to mine enemies,’ while he rocked and swayed on top of the small mountain of legs and arms and heads loaded on the wagon, as it wound its way through the encampment.

  This was a dream Rahim had experienced many times before, and he knew it like an old and familiar movie. Sometimes he played a soldier, once the Khan himself, but mostly he was just an extra in the drama that filled his sleep. And because it was a familiar dream, he was not at all scared by its horror. Indeed, since his system had been introduced to heroin, he found himself capable of manipulating the story in his sleep, just like a movie director. So it was that Rahim allowed the drama to cut to the tent of the Khan.

  Rahim approached the guards outside the entrance. He could see the fear in their eyes, for Rahim had become associated with Death, indeed was His emissary. ‘Tell the Khan that I, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim, can deliver Caffa to him.’

  The guards looked nervously at each other. They were clearly frightened of him, but equally fearful of disturbing the Khan’s pleasure, the cries of ecstasy and pain rising in volume from the captured women within. But on this long campaign in foreign lands, the guards, themselves soldiers, knew the importance of spies, traitors and stratagems. Yes, the Khan would be angry at the disturbance, but war came before a women’s legs were parted and the guards would lose their lives if they were involved in prolonging the siege one day long
er than necessary. Fortunately, while they considered Rahim’s request, a scream mixed with the grunt of male orgasm told the guards that their king’s lust was spent, and they allowed the filthy pedlar of death to pass after searching him thoroughly.

  Rahim entered the tent and saw the Khan lying amongst five naked women, all of them smeared with the blood of a sixth woman disembowelled on the floor. Rahim surmised rightly that the dead woman was a virgin, and free of the disease, and so her blood possessed magical protective powers.

  ‘What!’ demanded the Khan when he saw Rahim enter, blood dripping from his beard.

  ‘Great Khan. I can deliver Caffa to you.’

  Such was Rahim’s ability to manipulate the dream that he moved it forward again to the moment marking the beginning of the end of the siege of Caffa. Rows of trebuchets were assembled in crescents around the city walls, their wheels chocked and raised to provide maximum elevation and, hence, range. Rahim himself had been given the task of loading their pouches with the lethal cargo, fresh human corpses displaying the largest black swellings under their arms and in their groins. And there were many corpses available as the swelling disease had cut a swath through the Mongol army, great piles of them stacked ready and waiting, oozing filth with a stench that made even Rahim gag.

  Rahim watched for the Khan’s signal, a nod to the herald with the cow’s horn. A groan from one of the bodies loaded on the sling beside him distracted him and he missed the movement of the Khan’s head, but the clear notes that rang hard against the city walls were unmistakable.

  Rahim wondered if this was what the general meant when he said, ‘Give me to mine enemies,’ but it was a good idea. Rahim himself gave the order and the hammers came down on the locating pins, releasing the massive counterweights and leather springs that wound rapidly back to their stops. The heavy trebuchet arms swung through their arcs in unison and, with a mighty crash, the first wave of infected corpses flew high in the air and cleared the walls of the city. The Mongols cheered while the townspeople on the parapet watched perplexed at the tangled human mass that sailed overhead and landed with a distressing splat on the muddy walkways and stonework within the walls.