It was unworthy and probably sinful, but he envied many of the fedayeen who had brought their families with them. When they were not fighting, they probably enjoyed this sort of ease and pleasure back at the settlements. Yusuf couldn't help but dream about a future in which he lived in a nice house tended by his boys. Maybe his wife would even be a young blond like the one in bed with him. After all, though they were fighting the Americans now, it was only because they resisted the message of peace brought by the Prophet. One day, when this was done, Yusuf hoped all the peoples of the world would live together peacefully. A girl like this, he thought, gazing at the sinuous curve of her spine, might even love him for bringing that message, which, Allah willing, would be almost as good as dying in battle.
They were fighting for more than just revenge, he knew. They were fighting for a new home, a place untouched by the atomic evil of the Jews. They were fighting for the future.
He shook it off. If he was to have a family of his own, then Allah would provide.
The question on his mind now was how to get back to the front. Was he to simply walk out and request transport to the front? Did they intend him to join a new saif? Yusuf had no idea.
He rolled out of bed and padded across to a window. The deep, rumbling growl of war reached him even up here, miles from the front. The room overlooked the great park in the center of the city, which appeared to have exploded in a riot of plant growth that spilled out into the surrounding streets. Many of the larger, older trees had died some time ago, probably from the great chemical storms that had drifted over the city when the rest of the continent burned. Their stark skeletal forms stood out like witches' claws against the gray clouds that hovered low over the city, obscuring the upper floors of some of the higher towers. Thousands of saplings had sprung up in the deep grass between them, and a dense understory of vines and bushes had crawled over the wall around the park and appeared to be advancing on the hotel in which he was staying.
The emir, in his benevolence and wisdom, had not merely armed and trained his followers for war. On the long voyage here, besides lessons in the art of city fighting and lectures on the tactics and weapons of the Americans and the bandit gangs of the city, there had been some time set aside for more civilized learning. A teacher, a refugee from the Balkan wars, had told Yusuf how the faithful had first come here many hundreds of years ago, how they had settled near this park and set up gardens, markets, and even a mosque. Why had Allah chosen to let his message wither in this place? Yusuf wondered. Why had so much bloodshed been allowed to come of it?
He could see the ragged edges of human habitation on the western side of the park, on the undeclared border with the areas controlled by the Slavs. They would be swept into the firestorm for certain soon enough. A savage people, all but barbaric from what he had been taught of them. They seemed to revel in cruelty.
The Americans, in contrast, killed with the flip of a switch. If they gave a thought to murder, it was before or after the act, not during. And they flipped that switch as far away from their victims as possible, as if they thought themselves little gods. Too good for the ugliness they brought into the world.
He should be out there now, he thought, with his comrades or even with the janissaries, whom he had to admit were just as deeply invested in this fight as the faithful. Their aims were not righteous by any means, but they served God nonetheless.
He should be there.
A knock at the door drew his attention away from the park. He was surprised and not a little embarrassed to find Ahmet Ozal standing at the entrance to the hotel suite. Yusuf was naked and felt his face grow warm with shame. Ozal just laughed.
"You are recovered from your adventures, then?" said the fedayeen commander before grinning mischievously. "These American women, they do not have the modesty of good Muslim women. But they have their uses, yes."
Yusuf also grinned, unsure of himself. He moved toward the bed to put his pants on.
"Yes, get dressed," Ozal said. "We have much to discuss, and then we must both get back to the fight. There will be time for this later." He waved a hand at the the American girl.
Yusuf could see her eyelids fluttering as she desperately tried to maintain the facade of being asleep. He dressed as quickly as he could. His clothes, a black battle dress uniform, were new and unfamiliar, but his old keffiyeh had been laundered and returned to him. It was torn and a few bloodstains still showed, but he was glad to have it back. His boots took a few moments to lace up, and he worried that Ozal would lose patience with him, but whenever he looked up, he found the giant Turk smiling indulgently.
"Tuck your pants into your boots so you don't trip on them," Ozal said.
Yusuf, flushed with embarrassment, did as he was told. Then he tucked in his T-shirt for good measure, pulled on the black battle dress jacket, and hurried over to the door without a backward glance at the slave girl. He wondered if she would have to clean the room.
He found two more men outside wearing the same type of uniform, fedayeen bodyguards for Ahmet Ozal. The corridor was dark, with no natural light to illuminate it at this point. A few ceiling lamps threw small pools of yellow light down on the green-bordered carpet, presumably powered by a generator somewhere in the building. Patterned wallpaper and the shadows of square columns that jutted into the hallway every few feet lent the area a gloomy, almost spooky atmosphere. Yusuf could very easily imagine himself being pursued down this corridor by the ghosts of those who had lost their lives and souls here. A service cart stood abandoned outside one room, still stocked with hundreds of little plastic bottles of shampoo and shower gel. He recognized them from the bathroom in his own suite. A maid's uniform lay next to the cart, rigid and unclean with whatever dried-up soup remained of its owner. Yusuf grimaced with distaste. So excited had he been when he was first escorted up here, he had not even noticed the relic, and he wondered now why it had been left to clutter up the emir's personal harem.
He wanted to ask Ozal how the struggle was going, but his jaw seemed to have been wired shut and his tongue was thick with shyness. The great Turkish warrior, for his part, seemed perfectly happy to amble along smoking a thin cigar he produced from a breast pocket and humming an unfamiliar tune. They entered a fire escape at the end of the hallway and climbed down three flights of stairs. The floor at which they exited was decorated in the same fashion, with old opulent-looking rugs and long golden drapes that had not been dusted in many years. Yusuf could tell immediately that this level was different. The rooms here did not appear to be for the accommodation of guests. There were only a few of them, and they were very large.
"This way, through here," Ozal said. "I'm afraid the facilities are very spare. The Americans are devils for tracking our movements through the city and sending their warplanes against us whenever we let our guard down."
He waved his cigar around as they entered what looked like a large ballroom with a glass roof. There were no tables in there, just row upon row of stackable chairs facing a small raised dais. Yusuf felt his skin crawl as he realized that most of the chairs were occupied by the remains of the dead. There must have been hundreds of them in there when Allah swept up their souls and cast them down into hell.
"The emir has not long been in this hotel," said Ozal, who seemed not to care. "But within a day we shall be gone again. It is not safe to remain anywhere for very long."
"Not even with the prisoners we hold here?" Yusuf asked when he found his voice again. His found it very difficult not to stare at the dark, contaminated piles of clothing, all so neatly laid out in rows. And their shoes, he thought with renewed horror, look at their shoes. Aloud, he went on, "Would they bomb us here knowing they would kill their own kind?"
Ahmet Ozal seemed to give the question serious consideration as he drew a few deep puffs from his cigar.
"It is hard to say," he admitted. "Their leader, this Kipper, he is not a man given to making hard choices, which are the only kind available in war. But some of his of
ficers? Yes, they would attack in a second. Or perhaps they might send some of their special forces soldiers in an attempt to rescue their women. They are weak like that, the Americans. You will often draw many of them to their doom by staking out just one or two of their number as bait."
Yusuf felt greatly honored to be privy to the grand strategies of his superiors and again reflected with some disbelief that it was not so long ago he had found himself questioning those strategies as he quaked under the ferocious assault of the American war machine. Now he kept his mouth shut and was glad of it when his eyesight adjusted to the gloom of the darkened ballroom and he realized there were other men in there, sitting clustered in a small semicircle of chairs in an alcove off to the side of the room.
Bandits. "This is Yusuf Mohammed, one of my warriors and the only one to survive the American counterattack on Ellis Island," Ahmet Ozal declared in an almost proprietary tone. Yusuf winced as the Turk's enormous hand smacked into the meat of his shoulder.
"I may be wrong," said one of the bandits, a black man but not an African as best Yusuf could tell, "but weren't your fedayeen ordered to give up their lives rather than be captured by the Americans?"
He was dark-skinned with a wild explosion of black dreadlocked hair and a face marked by what looked like ceremonial scars. He spoke in English. Yusuf did his best to keep his expression neutral when confronted with the unspoken accusation.
Ozal nearly growled in reply. "But the Americans did not capture him. Yusuf evaded them as the Prophet evaded the assassins of Mecca."
The hot flush that seemed to suffuse Yusuf's entire upper body was fueled by a sense of shame that anyone would compare him with the Prophet. He tried to speak up, but Ozal held up one hand in a peremptory warning. The boy soldier fell silent. His Turkish commander plowed on.
"The emir is not foolish or wasteful with the lives of his followers. He does not ask that they give up their lives needlessly. By surviving the attack on the island and coming safely back to us, Yusuf provides us with information that we would otherwise not have."
Another of the bandit leaders spoke up. Yusuf had to assume these men had some leadership role, given that they were here. This man spoke Arabic, but his complexion was sallow. He looked European, perhaps from the south, where there was much fighting between the faithful and the unbelievers. Yusuf's own Arabic was still very basic, and he was not yet confident in conversation with fluent speakers, although he was able to follow what others said in the language if he concentrated.
"Your emir might dole out the lives of his own men with the parsimony of an old Jew," said the man, "but he spends the lives of our men like a drunken fornicator."
Yusuf expected Ozal to flare in anger at the insulting comparison, but he was wrong. The Turk simply grinned and folded his arms, which emphasized his huge physical stature.
"We are all bleeding, Jukic," he said with an undertone of threat. "Very few of the fedayeen I have sent to fight the Americans have come back. And then only to have their injuries treated before returning to the fray, as Yusuf soon will. Is that not so, boy?"
Realizing he had been drawn into the conversation, Yusuf nodded. It was not a lie. He desperately wanted to get back to the front. He had something to prove to himself, to the emir and Ozal, but most importantly to God. Of course that meant nothing to the bandit leaders sitting in a rough semicircle in front of him. They all regarded him suspiciously.
"So what is it you have brought us here to learn, Ozal?" asked the one called Jukic.
Ozal pulled up a chair and gestured at Yusuf to sit in it.
"My lad here has done something none of us have managed," he said. "He has passed through those parts of the city claimed by the Serbs and the Russians and noted several of the most important depots and barracks as he did so. The emir has decided that in gratitude for your continued support in our fight against the common enemy, we will share this knowledge with you and make no claim on any plunder that may arise from it. The treasure houses of the Slavs, as much our common enemy as the Americans, are yours for the taking." Ozal paused significantly. "When the battle is done."
Yusuf felt his testicles crawl up inside his body as the bandit leaders suddenly turned their attention on him like the edge of a sharpened blade.
"Go on, young one," Ozal said. "Tell our comrades here what you told my men when you made it back to our part of the city."
Yusuf swallowed twice before he was able to speak. The first time his throat clicked dry, a most uncomfortable feeling. The light-skinned bandit named Jukic tossed him a small clear plastic bottle of water that had been sitting by his feet. Yusuf caught it awkwardly but nodded his thanks for the drink. After a few sips, when he thought he could speak without coughing or gagging, he repeated the story he had told Ozal's men when they had intercepted him attempting to cross the park he had seen from his window upstairs.
"I escaped the Americans by jumping into the water when their bombardment was at its fiercest," he explained, resisting the urge to buff up his story so that it shined with a false glimmer of heroism and adventure. "I was frightened. I am sorry…"
Yusuf flicked a nervous look over at Ozal, but the giant merely shrugged and made a circular motion in the air with the end of his cigar. Go on.
"There are no fearless men in battle," Ahmet Ozal said. "Only fools and angels go to war without fear, and there are neither in this room."
Two of the bandit leaders smirked, the one called Jukic and the dark-skinned man with the big hair and the facial scars. The third of the pirates, an African like Yusuf, showed no emotion at all. He simply stared at Yusuf like a bird of prey watching a mouse.
"I drifted for a long time," Yusuf said. As he spoke, he grew a little less nervous. The men seemed interested in his story. He took another sip of water from the bottle Jukic had tossed him.
He could not help staring at the remains of the Disappeared and wondering whether they had been aware of their own deaths. Had God struck them down all at once, or did he take them one after the other so that the last to go knew the terror of what was to happen to them? That had been a favorite tactic of Captain Kono. Instantly he regretted that line of thought. It must surely be blasphemous to compare an animal like Kono with Allah himself. Yusuf's heart began to beat painfully hard in his chest, and sweat broke out on his forehead.
Ozal seemed to note his discomfort. "Go on, boy," he said.
"The streets were all flooded down there," Yusuf said. "It was like the river had come up a long time ago and wasn't going down again. I had no weapon and I did not know where I was, but I knew the emir was somewhere near the big park in the middle."
"How did you walk up the street if it was flooded?" Jukic asked.
"Sometimes I swam," he answered. "Sometimes I grabbed on to whatever was floating by. But there are many cars and other vehicles blocking the roads down there, many of them unseen under the water, and I often hurt my legs on them."
"Did you see any men down there?" the African pirate leader asked. "Any Russians or Serbs?"
Yusuf shook his head emphatically.
"Not down there, no. There is nothing alive down there. It's too difficult and dangerous to move around. I got caught once or twice, my legs trapped and held by something under the water that I couldn't even see. I was lucky it was not raining and the water was not flowing quickly or rising, because I would have drowned. I moved very slowly, sometimes swimming from one building to another, swimming in through the windows, moving from one hiding spot to another so I would not be seen. Sometimes I was able to cover more ground by climbing over piles of trucks and containers that the water had jammed up against one another. There were many shipping containers down there, some of them floating around. I was almost crushed by one as I tried to swim through an intersection."
The men all nodded, none of them interrupting him.
"Go on," Ozal said. "Tell them how you came across your first Slav."
Yusuf exhaled slowly, still shaken by the memory
.
"I was floating between a line of buildings, and then my feet were dragging on the ground. Not just touching something solid every now and then but dragging on the road surface."
"You were just floating," Jukic said with open disbelief.
"I was holding on to a big plastic bottle," Yusuf explained. "A really big one. A water bottle, big and empty."
The European seemed satisfied with the explanation.
"I was tired. It felt like I had been swimming for hours. I saw a parking garage where the infidel used to keep their cars stacked on top of each other. The water was lapping only halfway up the office of this garage. I started kicking for it, thinking I might have a rest on the second floor, which was dry.
"It was late in the day, not yet night but maybe an hour or so from getting dark. I was so tired, and I think that's what saved me. I was not splashing or making much noise. I swam in through the big roll-up door and over to a staircase that led upstairs. When I reached the steps, I just pulled myself out of the water and lay there. It was only after a couple of minutes I realized I could hear someone upstairs, snoring. I did not know what to do. I couldn't swim out of the building in case they saw me. Unlike me, they were almost certain to be armed. After a short time I decided to crawl up as quietly as I could. I had done this many times before back home when I fought with Captain Kono. He would often send us into the villages when everyone was asleep. I just did what I have always done, moved as quietly as a snake upon a bird's egg.
"I found him in the first room at the top of the stairs. Just one man with a rifle leaned up against the window, probably looking for people like me coming from the river. You will probably find guards like him on each of the streets leading up from the water."
Ozal and Jukic both nodded in approval. The other two were silent and unmoved, but their faces no longer wore any trace of skepticism.
"I stood behind him for some time, listening for any others, but he was alone. There was a desk in the room with many papers impaled on a thin metal spike. It was the only weapon available without searching any further. The rifleman was leaning back in his chair with his head tipped toward the ceiling. I picked up the spike and removed the papers as quietly as I could. Then I killed him with it. Stabbed him in the neck. It seemed to take a long time for him to die and there was a lot of blood, but I kept my hand over his mouth and he was off balance in the chair, so he could not fight back."
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