After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  "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."

  Dalby gave her a quizzical look as they rode the elevator down to the car park.

  "Sometimes with you Americans it is impossible to know whether you are b
eing funny or simply far too enthusiastic."

  "Jeez, Dalby, and they reckon we don't get irony."

  "Nobody gets irony anymore, Caitlin. We live in a post-ironic world."

  She slung her backpack, a small overnight bag really, into the back of Dalby's precious little car and folded herself into the passenger seat. He turned on the radio after doing up his belt, locking the doors, and keying the ignition-the exact same sequence of actions he performed every time they climbed into the compact Mercedes. Caitlin wondered why he didn't just leave the radio on, but she was coming to understand that Mister Dalby was a man of very particular habits. The only music he ever played in the car was a CD compilation of popular classics. And when he wasn't playing that, he would listen to BBC Radio 4, which was what she would have called a news radio channel.

  He flicked that on now as Caitlin ran her fingers through still-damp hair, tying it back with an elastic band. She'd had time for a quick shower this morning but not for much else in the way of personal grooming. At least the water had been reasonably hot this time. On her last extended trip to the Cage the hot water in the hotel had been out for two days, and when it did come back on, it smelled strongly of sulfur. Dalby drove out of the car park as Charlotte Green finished a report on trials of GM wheat and soy in Wiltshire.

  "We were part of that," said Caitlin. "Bret was supposed to go to a briefing up in Swindon before Richardson's crew tried to hit him."

  Dalby turned onto Whitechapel Road before negotiating the turn onto the A13. Traffic was very light as always, just a few commercial vehicles and a bus coming in from the suburbs. It was three minutes before they saw another private car like their own. Most of the shops along the retail strip were still closed, many of them boarded up for good. Here and there, though, she did see a new cafe, and in one case a knitwear store had opened. So perhaps the chancellor of the Exchequer was not talking entirely through his ass when he spoke about a few "promising green shoots" poking through the ashen wasteland of Britain's post-Wave economy. After all, they had been getting increasing orders for Bret's farmhouse goat cheese these past three months, which was very much a luxury item, something he had begun pottering about with, in the English style, after reading an article on Britnet about artisan cheese making.

  "Do you enjoy the farm, Caitlin? It's not in your family history, is it? Farming, I mean. You were an air force child as I recall."

  She had never told him that, but she wasn't surprised that he knew. As soon as Dalby had been given her case, he would have called for her personnel file and had probably even spoken to her old controller, Wales Larrison, who worked liaison in Vancouver these days. Thinking of Wales gave her an unexpected pang of homesickness.

  "My grandparents on Mom's side scratched at the Dust Bowl for a while in Oklahoma," she said. "But not for long. So no, I wouldn't say we were farming folk. But I do enjoy it, Dalby. It's… peaceful, you know. Even getting out of bed at four in the morning to go fist some poor cow in a freezing barn… it's better than being stuck in the cells at fucking Noisy-le-Sec, let me tell you."

  "You don't have to tell me," he said without elaborating.

  The six o'clock bulletin came on, read by Alan Smith.

  "Fighting continues in New York," he announced, "after a failed attempt on the life of President James Kipper yesterday. U.S. forces press on with their counteroffensive to retake the strategic port against heavy resistance. Prime Minister Howard will call the Cabinet Security Committee together this morning to discuss what help might be offered the U.S. administration."

  "Do you really think that business was an assassination attempt on Kipper?" Dalby asked as they passed a small convoy of Ministry of Resources vans heading into town. "I mean, it seems a rather ham-fisted way to have at a chap, I would have thought. It's not as though your Mister Kipper doesn't present himself as a tempting target most days of the week, anyway, with this living among the people rubbish of his."

  "Why, Dalby," Caitlin said in a delighted voice, "I do believe that's the most disapproving tone I have ever heard from you. Not a Kipper man, then, eh?"

  The Home Office man nearly blushed at his indiscretion.

  "Oh, I'm sure I don't have any opinion at all of U.S. politics, Caitlin. I find the plethora of new green parties and millennarian crazy men to be quite beyond fathoming. As I'm sure many of your country folk must long for the certainties of the old two-party system."

  "Like here?" She smirked.

  "Point taken," he muttered as they drove slowly past a minibus that had been pulled over by heavily armed special constables. The occupants were filing out, hands on heads, and lining up by the side of the road in front of a cash and carry and a money transfer bureau, apparently both owned by the same Indian family. A hand-painted sign hanging in the window of the money transfer announced "Fresh Basmati this Tuesday!" The minibus passengers looked like they were probably Pakistanis, or 'deshis from the Enclosures in South London, being bused into the city for a work detail. They had a sullen, beaten-down air of resignation about them and paid no heed to the three Indian children who came laughing and spilling out of the shop to watch. One of the specials crouched down on one knee while keeping his MP5 trained on the detainees to exchange a joke with the smiling, chattering children. Caitlin wondered whether the detainees envied those on the watch list who'd been deported. The Enclosures was a very grim and isolated place.

  And then they were past the scene. Alan Smith continued in his calm, almost sublime way, recounting tales of horror from the night. The firebombing of a Hindu corner store in Newham that had killed the family of eight sleeping in the rooms above. The famine in western China. And an Amnesty International report on death squads in President Morales's South American Federation led into a final bookend report on Brazil's resurgent nuclear weapons program.

  Caitlin listened despondently, wondering whether there might be a lighter story at the end of the bulletin simply to lift the spirits. But before handing off to the sports desk, the newsreader finished with a reminder that government inspectors would be double-checking ration cards this week after a significant increase in the incidence of forgeries.

  "Enough gloom for one morning, I think," Dalby said, and he switched the audio to his classical compilation CD. The track that came on was Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, which to Caitlin's way of thinking wasn't exactly "Disco Inferno." It was more "music to eat your pistol by," and she did her best to block it out.

  "Have you sent anything to Wales about Baumer yet?" she asked. "He'd want to know."

  "Mister Larrison, you mean? Yes. Vancouver liaison gets a routine weekly brief from the Cage on all of our doings and a-goings-on. And given your involvement, I sent an extraordinary update as soon as I had enough detail."

  Caitlin sat up in the passenger seat.

  "So did Wales have a reading on it?"

  Dalby frowned. "I'm afraid that with this business in New York all of your government's intelligence resources have been retasked onto the pirate issue. Indeed, most of ours, too. A good deal of Echelon's continental and African assets are now actively attempting to interdict the pirate traffic at the source. So although Mister Larrison was concerned and sent his best wishes, he was happy to leave the running on Mister Baumer to me and thee. Like you, he saw this as a personal vendetta and best dealt with… personally."

  Caitlin was a little pissed off that Dalby hadn't told her about the contact with Wales, but he had been so good about everything else that she let it slide. After all, her old controller had effectively shined them on, and he would have been hell busy with New York.

  Instead, she concentrated on the view outside. As bleak as that was, there were a few pleasant interludes. They stopped behind two buses outside a small park just after Wharf Lane. She could see a few families over the brick wall, laboring away at their vegetable plots while smaller children played in the trees. They had probably come down from the council flats behind the converted garden and seemed to be enjoying themselves tendi
ng the rows of carrots, peas, and potatoes. An older man, half stooped and white-haired, a geezer in the local parlance, shared a thermos of something hot with a large black man, a West Indian, she guessed, who wore the bright red patch of a London council auxiliary sewn on his sweater. He leaned on an ax handle while enjoying his "cuppa." He would be there to discourage any raids on the site by gangs of chavs or munters who, in Caitlin's opinion, could do with a bit of fucking Enclosures themselves.

  By the time they had driven down as far as the All Saints station on the East India Dock Road, the residents of the flats that lined both sides of the street were beginning to shuffle out into the gray, wet morning to join lengthening queues for buses and trains. Dalby's zippy German car attracted many envious looks as he subtly increased his speed through the area, and more than a few of the waiting commuters resentfully gave him the finger.

  They drove for another twenty minutes, passing thousands of people trudging to line up for public transport into the city, if they were lucky. Many would have to make multiple transfers, and as much as everybody had once bitched about being caught in peak-hour traffic, it seemed much worse when there was no traffic at all save for the fleets of buses. It had never been an issue for Caitlin, of course, but she had read that it wasn't unusual for people to spend up to four or five hours a day in transit, and she often wondered why they didn't just move closer to wherever they needed to be.

  They passed another park given over to agriculture, except this one was much larger than the little plot closer to the city. It looked big enough to have hosted a whole complex of sports fields at one time, and she could tell at a glance that the two tractors plowing the rich black soil were preparing it for a single seed planting. It must have been a ministry operation, as modest little council plots did not run to the sort of gas allowance one needed for tractor farming, although the small crowd she saw huddled at the rear of the field undoubtedly meant the actual planting would be done by hand.