The emir and his advisers mumbled assent. What Bashir had said was true, or at least not to be argued with. The emir could not help doubting himself, though. The casualties among the janissaries were very high, and although his own men had suffered commensurately, they were far fewer in number. It could not be long before the leaders of the bandit gangs with whom he had struck an alliance began to question the arrangement. After all, what did it profit a man to have a whole city at his feet if he had no means by which to plunder it? The submarines and warships of many countries already cut into profit margins by boarding or sinking a percentage of treasure ships as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Some of them were little better than pirates themselves in his opinion.
“Amin is correct,” he conceded. “It saddens me that Kipper survived our attack, but it is the will of Allah, and to wish it any other way is not just weakness, it is a sin.”
He stood back from the makeshift map table and smiled at his comrades, his friends. The office in which they were gathered was small and looked out on a much larger area in which stood nearly two dozen desks, at least half of them occupied by his officers as they worried away at the details of their particular responsibilities within the widening firestorm engulfing Manhattan. So hastily had they had to move after the Americans targeted the last command post that there had not even been time to properly clear away the remains of those who had died there when Allah’s sword swept all life from this continent. The noxious remains had been piled up in a mountain of stiff, blackened clothing over in the far corner. A couple of janissaries had been employed for that work, a fatwa from the grand mufti having declared the remains of the so-called Disappeared to be unclean.
“I am afraid I have sinned,” the emir confessed, quickly raising his hands to forestall any disagreement. “I am sorry, but in trying to strike down Kipper I could not help but see myself holding the spear that pierced the heart of Gordon at Khartoum. A failure of humility on my part and a grave insult to Allah, blessed be his name. It may even be why this pig still lives and why the fight goes so hard.”
The other men looked on somberly, none of them rushing to disagree but all of them looking very uncomfortable.
“Still, although we have not cut the head off the snake, we have stamped it beneath our boots and, I believe, injured it gravely. Kipper is much weaker now than he was this time last week. He is not a warrior. He does not rush to the fight as we do or even as his soldiers do. And yet he is drawn into this battle unwillingly, halfheartedly. We all know where that path leads.”
Abu Dujana folded his arms and took on a defiant air. “Our onslaught will not be a weak faltering affair,” he said, quoting from the Prophet. “We shall fight as long as we live. We will fight until they turn to Islam. We will fight not caring whom we meet. We will fight whether we destroy ancient holdings or achieve hard-won gains. We will mutilate every opponent. We will drive them violently before us at the command of Allah and Islam. We will fight until our religion is established. And we will plunder them, for they must suffer disgrace.”
The emir nodded approvingly, although he did not necessarily see the need to quote chapter and verse at the great length to which Dujana was often given. A simple “Let’s kick their fucking asses” would have sufficed. Dujana was a traditionalist, however.
“And that is how it shall be,” he said, smiling at the warrior from Indonesia. “Kipper’s survival does not make the Americans stronger; it makes them weaker. He is a weak man without the stomach for war or the strong-arm with which to make it.”
As he spoke, the emir became more confident that what he said was actually true and not merely an empty platitude mouthed for the benefit of his followers. It was true that one could not ask for a better opponent than this president. Such reluctance to fight in a so-called commander in chief was a rare gift to his opponent. It must surely be the will of Allah.
“The more we draw him in here, the more blood we let, the weaker he will become.” He waved away the map of Manhattan lying before them as though it were of no concern at all. “Perhaps if he is weakened enough, this crazy man Blackstone will finally take his Texas Republic away from Seattle and tear this country asunder. That may well be our purpose here, my friends. If we are penitent, if we humble ourselves before God, he may well show us that his design did not end with us leading our armies to the gates of Seattle like Dujana led his men to the palace in Jakarta.”
His Indonesian comrade bowed humbly in acknowledgment of the compliment as the emir continued.
“Such arrogance is hardly befitting servants of God. But if the Americans turn on each other as the desert Arabs turned on each other in the day of our Prophet, then our work will be done and we will yet bring peace to this land that once dared threaten the House of Peace.”
Dujana and Bashir nodded enthusiastically as though they were students who had suddenly come to understand a difficult mathematical theorem. The fourth man in the room, a great barrel-chested Turk by the name of Ahmet Ozal, folded his massive arms and nodded slowly but had a deep scowl on his face. It looked as though he were examining a deal in which he was almost certain to come off poorly. He had not spoken at all in the meeting, and the emir waited on his reply with some trepidation. Ozal commanded the largest contingent of fedayeen in the city, and his men were by far the best trained, equipped, and led. He was also the man the emir relied on to manage their relationship with the pirate gangs. Although he had pledged his allegiance to the cause and his obedience to the emir, his agreement was not a given. Ahmet Ozal was very much his own man, and he would choose to serve Allah in his own way. After an excruciating half minute, he nodded gravely and finally spoke.
“You are very wise for one so young, Emir.”
A sly smile stole across his broad, brown face. “It must be the Turkish blood winning out over your German heritage,” he said before clapping his hands loudly. “I agree. We must draw the Americans in here and defeat them on their own land, fighting for their own home. If we do that, we will break them here. We will break them everywhere. Then this will become our new home, and it will be a House of Peace.”
The emir smiled, unafraid to show that he was relieved he still had everyone with him. He might not be an expert on urban warfare, but he was an expert on dealing with people, and he knew it was as much a mistake to demand loyalty as it was to expect it unconditionally. He needed these men. Allah needed these men.
“How goes it with the janissaries?” he asked the Turk. “They have suffered fearful losses and few gains, and unlike us they have no higher cause.”
Ahmet Ozal waved his hand dismissively.
“For now they fight because the gains are enough. The leaders have been well rewarded with plunder from the other cities, and the fighters themselves are well supplied with strong drink and kif and of course the promise of loot, land, and slaves.”
The emir looked to Dujana, expecting him to protest the use of drink among the janissaries. It was a sticking point with the Indonesian, but for once he remained silent. Perhaps with the balance of the battle so delicately poised he was willing to contemplate a loosening of his rigid doctrinal standards for even a small tactical advantage. The bandits did fight with much greater ferocity and abandon when their minds were inflamed with drugs. The emir was not sure it made them a more effective tool of war, but if it kept them running at the American lines, wearing down their numbers with the sheer relentlessness of their attacks, it could not be a bad thing. Especially not if it meant that when the time came to reconsider their truce with the bandit leaders, the janissaries were much weakened.
He was about to bend himself to the task of disentangling the mess of differently colored squiggle lines and saif designations on the big map in front of him when a commotion in the outer office drew his attention. Two of the janissary guards were manhandling a small African boy toward the door. The emir did not recognize him, but he had the look of a street fighter about him, and from the filthy scarf around his neck he
was obviously fedayeen, even if only a lowly spear carrier in one of the saif. The boy was struggling fiercely and seemed very distressed. Bashir and Dujana looked unconcerned, but Ahmet Ozal glowered furiously at the scene before turning his back on the map table and stalking out into the main room.
“What the hell is going on here?” he roared. “This boy fights with one of my saif. Let him go now.”
The janissaries seemed unsure what to do. They obviously had a reason for detaining the boy, and they looked to the emir to resolve the dilemma. They were charged with securing this office, and the boy had no good reason that the emir could see for being in there. But Ozal was fiercely protective of his men, and they were fiercely loyal to him. The emir smiled as warmly as he could at the two guards while waving them away and indicating to the young one that he should come forward.
“What is your name, boy? And whose saif do you fight with?”
Ozal frowned and answered for him. “I do not know his name, Emir. But from his keffiyeh I’d say he fought with Mustafa Ali on Ellis Island.”
A hush fell across the room as the boy came forward. He looked frightened but also angry. When he spoke, it was in slow halting English rather than Arabic, which told the emir that he was probably a recent convert who was still learning the language of the fedayeen. The fact that he was fighting in Manhattan, however, marked him out as someone with some skill and experience of at least township war and possibly full-blown urban conflict. Possibly more so than the emir himself could boast.
“Yusuf Mohammed, my sheikh,” answered the boy. “And yes, I was on Ellis Island.”
He seemed ashamed to admit as much, but to the emir there was no mystery about that. Every man he had sent to Ellis Island was either dead or captured. If they were fedayeen, the former only. The holy warriors had all taken a vow to die, by their own hands if necessary, before allowing the infidel to capture them. Again, the grand mufti had issued a fatwa absolving any man who took his own life in such circumstances. Greater glory in heaven awaited those who took a number of the enemy with them, of course. The emir was curious as to how and why this young man had escaped such a fate, especially since he must have traversed the city to make it to this command bunker.
“Bring us some tea and some fruit,” he commanded nobody in particular. One of the junior officers hurried out to the little kitchen down the corridor where they kept a small stash of field rations. “You must be hungry and thirsty, is that right, Yusuf?”
The boy’s eyes went wide, and he nodded with nervous vigor.
“Yes, my sheikh. But I … I did not …”
The emir smiled and walked over to pat him on the shoulder, steering him toward a chair. He gestured for the boy to sit. Seeing this Yusuf Mohammed treated with such deference and respect changed the atmosphere in the room from surprise and a vague sense of threat to something more akin to curiosity. A small bowl of dried apricots and dates appeared, followed shortly by a steaming mug of black tea.
“I’m afraid we have no milk or sugar,” the emir explained. “It’s just a guess, but I imagine that you learned your English on a mission station somewhere, perhaps in Uganda or Kenya.”
The boy regarded him with frank disbelief. He nodded slowly. “I was taught by nuns … sorry, infidels … in a village not far from Moroto. But I do not remember much of that time,” he hurried to add.
Ahmet Ozal lowered his massive frame to sit on the desk next to the boy, towering over him. He encouraged Yusuf to eat from the small bowl of fruit and to take a drink of tea.
“You will need your strength, boy, if you have somehow escaped from the Americans and made it here through the Serbs and the Russians. Is that the way you came? Through their territory on the western shore?”
Yusuf nodded anxiously. It appeared as if he was about to pour forth some long explanation of his trip before Ozal silenced him by gesturing at the dried fruit again.
“Eat up, boy,” he said before turning back to the others to explain. “Yusuf would be one of a number of converts we found among the barbarians of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the borderlands between what used to be Uganda and Somalia. Child fighters, mostly. They have attended to the message of the Prophet and allowed him into their hearts with great sincerity and eagerness, for the most part.”
The emir regarded the boy with some respect.
“That is hard country, Yusuf, especially since the abomination of the Jews’ atomic strike. You have done well to make it to such a ripe old age. What are you, fifteen or sixteen years old?”
The boy soldier shook his head.
“I do not know, my sheikh. I was with the LRA for a long time, and I was very young when they came and took me from the village.”
The emir let his compassion show openly on his face.
“I can understand that after being forced to fight for most of your life you might have wanted something other than a warrior’s fate when the fedayeen liberated you. I must thank you, Yusuf, for having the faith and the courage not to walk away from your calling. It is a good thing you have done coming here to the city, a good thing you did in the battle at Ellis Island, and an even better thing you have done finding your way back to us to add your strength to ours for the battle yet to come.”
Nobody spoke or even seemed to so much as breathe while the emir thanked the thin African boy for his service. The rumble of battle was distant but forever with them as the Americans expended enormous stockpiles of heavy ordnance in trying to pulverize the faithful and their allies at the southern end of the island. The whining scream of jets, the thud of helicopters, and the occasional tock-tock-tock of heavy weapons fire did not relent. But in the stuffy third-floor office where the emir had established his temporary command post, a blessed silence held. Yusuf Mohammed seemed overwhelmed. His eyes welled with tears, and all his limbs shook. Hitching sobs began to rack his upper body.
“But I’m not worthy … I didn’t …”
The emir squeezed his shoulder and hushed him.
“Only God can judge our worthiness at the end of days, Yusuf. It is not for me to sit in judgment on you who have had so much harder a time of it in this battle.”
The boy blinked away tears and pressed trembling lips together in an effort to maintain the last of his dignity.
“Are you still willing to fight, Yusuf? Will you take God’s message to the heathen who would bar it from this land?” the emir asked.
“Yes,” he answered in a small, quavering voice. “Always.”
“Then God will judge you worthy of his mercy and indulgence in this life and the next,” said the emir. “Go now. Get some rest. Spend this night in my own harem and be sure to tell Sheikh Ozal’s men everything of what you learned on Ellis and in the territory of the Slavs. It will be useful. It may even be important.”
The boy looked as though he wanted to say more, but in the end he simply put aside the small bowl of dates and apricots he held and reached out to kiss the emir’s hand.
Bilal Baumer, sometimes known as al Banna and now the putative emir of the promised lands, rubbed Yusuf’s filthy, matted hair with obvious affection and shooed the lad away.
Within an hour the story of the emir’s generosity and kindness would spread all the way to the front line. Especially the bit about the harem, a small caravan of captured women he saved for just this sort of thing. Although he would never actually partake of them himself—God only knew what sort of filth a ragamuffin like Yusuf was carrying—the idea that he might share his bedroom slaves with the lowest ranks of the fedayeen would add powerfully to his myth.
25
London
The London Cage occupied one part of a former paper-recycling plant on the river at Creekmouth, an industrial suburb east of the city. Caitlin and Dalby set out along the A13 after overnighting at the Ibis Hotel on Commercial Street in Aldgate. More than half the hotels in London had closed over the previous three years, but the Ibis chain had survived by virtue of a contract with the government to
provide discounted accommodations to civil servants traveling for work. Caitlin had stayed there before. She’d been too young to work behind the Iron Curtain, but she imagined that the old Soviet-era tourist hotels had probably been something like this. Clean but drab, with at least one “experience” to be savored in every room. A threadbare towel. A half-empty bar fridge. Flickering lightbulbs. Reused soap. And surly, off-putting security staff, a disconcerting number of whom were forbidding bull dykes seemingly recruited from some underground lesbian wrestling league. They prowled the floors constantly. Her first stay at the Aldgate Ibis, one had knocked on her door three times during the night, to “check that everything was in order,” leaving her alone only after Caitlin had jammed the muzzle of a Glock 17 in her face and shouted that apart from her not being a morning person, everything was “just fucking fine.”
This trip they checked in well after midnight and left just after dawn, with Dalby brushing aside all the usual demands for travel warrants, internal passports, and itineraries with a brusque refusal to cooperate and an imperious flick of his ID badge into the bleary, sleep-deprived face of the night manager, who was still on duty at six in the morning.
“You know, sometimes I think we should be done with it and just get ourselves Gestapo outfits,” Caitlin said. “You know, some really spanking long black leather coats and dark fedoras. Then we wouldn’t even have to worry about badging people or waving Glocks in their fucking faces. Everybody would just know to fear us.”
After America Page 26
