Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2)

by John Sweeney

  They hurried back to the hotel and went up to Joe’s room, where he switched on his computer and they searched ‘minarets dynamited’. To help clear his thoughts, Joe poured himself a hefty glass of Bushmills ten-year-old malt he’d brought with him. Humfrey gave him a sour look, so, with a proper show of reluctance, Joe poured him one, too. After a time Humfrey stumbled onto a page, and there was Jameela’s fallen minaret.

  Humfrey read the caption at the foot of the photograph.

  ‘Bosnia, 1993. And the killers who toppled the minaret were not any kind of Muslims, but Croat Catholic extremists. Your religion.’

  ‘I haven’t been to confession for two decades.’

  ‘Once a Catholic . . .’

  ‘Shut up. Listen, Dwayne—’

  ‘My name is Humfrey.’

  ‘Your real name is Dwayne. But let’s not fall out. You were right about the wrong concrete.’

  Humfrey nodded, but Joe sensed he was holding something back, something secret.

  ‘The Syrian movie you’re working up,’ Joe began. ‘Who the hell is going to give you money to do the ultimate Damascus sob story?’

  Humfrey started humming the theme tune from The Lion King.

  ‘Mickey Mouse?’ Joe asked, incredulous.

  ‘Mickey Mouse. Swear to God.’ Humfrey looked down the double barrel of his nostrils at Joe, taunting him to call him out as a liar.

  Joe said nothing.

  Humfrey smiled to himself and then announced: ‘I need some hallucinogenic drugs.’

  Joe told him that he was going to opt for a quiet night in. After Humfrey loped out of the room, Joe watched the video again and froze the frame showing Jameela and Ham in their suicide vests, then took out the photo of Jameela, bursting with bottled vitality, and held it by the side of the laptop and considered the two images, the playgirl and the wannabe suicide-homicide.

  He poured himself one last long slug of Bushmills, breathed in its witches’ brew of peat and dark Irishness, and, under his breath, asked the question that had been raging inside his head ever since Humfrey had worked out that the dynamited mosque had the wrong concrete: ‘Jameela, why are you lying to me?’

  Then Joe took another sip of Bushmills, then another, and another, but an answer to his question came there none.

  Joe fell asleep soon enough, and dreamt of a little boy all in black running down a lane in County Cork in the rain. Joe shouted at him and he turned around and only then did he see it was Ham in his suicide vest, his thumb poised over the trigger.

  RAQQA, EASTERN SYRIA

  Time wound back half a million days, or thirteen centuries. Under a molten sky, the black flag; under the black flag, they had tented over the sky. The canvas flapped in the hot noonday wind, carrying with it the smell of burning and the grit of war. The Euphrates glittered in the sun as it threaded its way through myriad muddy channels. In the city through which the shrunken river flowed, no radios burbled music, no TVs played Egyptian soaps, no one sang. Out in the open, the light burnt diamond-white; the shadows fell basalt-black.

  In the main square, three small iron-barred cages faced each other, blasted by the furnace heat. In one crouched a man, still conscious – just – caged for one day by the Hisbah, the religious police, for smoking a cigarette. In the second, a man who had been caught with a Taylor Swift video on his phone; caged for three days, he had lost consciousness and, although on the final day of his sentence, he didn’t have much longer to live. In the third cage was the torso of a man beheaded, left to rot for a week, the flies gorging on the bloodied meat of his neck. His crime had been selling SIM cards for cell phones.

  Down a side street, a woman cloaked in black ran out of her house and grabbed her little girl who had wandered out. The little girl screamed, and the woman slapped her, viciously, because she was afraid that someone might notice that she had left the house unaccompanied by a male guardian, a mahram. She picked up her howling daughter and ran back into the house, almost tripping over the doorsill in her haste to vanish from public view.

  Close by, in a shop, behind a curtain of beads, an old man, well beyond the fighting age, his beard far whiter than his grubby dishdasha, used a thick black pen to scratch over the face and hair of a blonde model on a dozen bottles of shampoo, whilst his young grandson, Haroun, looked on with a cold solemnity.

  A lone motorcycle turned down the street, moving slowly, not much faster than walking pace. It idled past the side entrance to Raqqa’s hospital, spun around and returned the way it had come, moving faster now. Ten minutes later it returned, followed by a second, then a third. The three motorcyclists came to a standstill, one hundred yards between each of them, in the middle of the tented-off street, as if they had the power to banish all traffic. Which they had.

  Another ten minutes passed. In the distance, the rumble of artillery. An elderly green Renault Clio, its windscreen cracked, edged along, moving curiously slowly like the motorbikes, its progress hidden from the sky by the ceiling of canvas stretched from one side of the street to the other. The Clio wheeled by in first gear. The old man in the shop stopped his airbrushing of the blondes to observe its passing. Once it had gone, he spat twice on the ground at his feet. Haroun, nine years in age but his eyes glinting with a knowledge of inhumanity that made him appear immensely older, studied his grandfather steadily, and the old man closed his eyes and instantly regretted his act of reckless foolishness.

  The Clio stopped directly outside the hospital’s entrance, swaddled so heavily in canvas and plastic tarpaulins that the brilliant glare of day was replaced by a gloom, as if it were late evening. Beneath the awning, five people got out of the Clio and looked up, involuntarily, at the taped-off sky. Understanding that the Far Enemy’s drones wouldn’t pulverise the city but would target leaders’ vehicles when they were on the move, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Prince of the Faithful, Caliph Ibrahim, had proclaimed a law that every home-dweller on pain of imprisonment should erect canvas tarpaulins twenty feet above all the main thoroughfares in the city. That way the Caliphate would render blind trillions of dollars’ worth of eye-in-the-sky technology.

  The Caliph’s plan worked beautifully. His movements were all done quietly, with no pace and some subtlety; the point being that when the Caliph arrived anywhere, it should always be a surprise. Hidden within the people were spies – this way, neither the people nor the spies got any warning; none at all.

  The Caliph’s party: himself, overweight, heftily built, bespectacled, with a pronounced limp thanks to a bomb blast that almost did for him, his beard thick, streaked with grey, going white at the edges; Khalil, his bodyguard-cum-executioner, a moronic giant, powerfully muscled, dressed in black, his face cloaked by a black veil of muslin, carrying an immense scimitar; a guard, also in black, toting an American machine gun confiscated from the Iraqi army when they ran away at Mosul; Hadeed – an Iraqi, a former brigadier-general in the Amn, Saddam’s intelligence service, now head of the most powerful of all the Caliphate’s intelligence services, the amniyat, the Amn al-Dawla – dead-eyed, silver-haired, lean, showing a military bearing, his moustache noticeably and unfashionably thicker than his beard in homage to his former master; and a woman cloaked entirely in a black hijab, featureless, blotted out. Led by the Caliph, the party hurried in the hospital entrance.

  Haroun followed them with his eyes, then his feet. As he left home, he gazed one last time at his grandfather, the old man’s lower lip trembling, afraid of what might be to come, but the boy was off, darting out from the beads, running across the street to return to the factory where he worked and, more importantly, to follow the man held to be the closest to God.

  As the Caliph swept inside, the hospital guards bowed their heads, caught unaware; women tending to their sick relatives hid behind their black abayas, scuttling to get out of his way. A child howled and his mother gave him a clout to shut him up, lest something bad happen; a surgeon in medical-green fatigues, grimy with dried blood, a devout Muslim, angry that his pati
ents now lacked the simplest medicines, saw the commotion and wanted to challenge the Caliph about the shortages of antibiotics, blood plasma, bandages, but was blocked by his nurse. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ he hissed, and the moment was gone.

  Haroun caught up with the tail end of the Caliph’s party as they threaded their way past beds full of civilians and soldiers – some amputees, some blinded, a few dying – turned right, and went down a set of stairs that led to the infant intensive care department. They were walking past a line of cots, from which wires led to bleeping machines, when the lights died. Someone swore, and then the Caliph’s guard and Khalil the executioner produced flashlights, the beams criss-crossing, catching a breastfeeding mother nursing her malnourished infant in one direction, a black cloth over a cot in another. Lit by the flashlight beams, the party walked on through the darkness, reaching the end of the department, then down a second set of stairs, then down, down, down a circular stairwell carved in the rock until they came to a massive metal blast door. The guard rushed forward to knock on the door. It opened from within and then they were inside, Haroun darting ahead then merging into the crowd of man-children gathering around him.

  This underground factory – brilliantly lit, powered by a set of petrol-engine generators different to those that powered the hospital – was a series of interlinked caves hacked out of the rock by the ancients, then vaulted by the Abbasid dynasty in the eighth century and improved upon by ISIS in the twenty-first. The Caliph stood on a raised section of rock overlooking the main space of the factory, one finger extended toward Paradise, Khalil by his side wielding his scimitar, its blade flashing in the electric lighting. Hadeed, the guard and the woman in black stood to one side, all eyes on the Caliph.

  The workforce morphed into a congregation: one hundred and four boys, all below the fighting age of twelve; no girls, no women apart from the Caliph’s concubine; ten men, mostly disabled in one way or another, lacking eyes, hands, legs. Only one man was whole; his name Timur al-Shishani, the master manufacturer: ginger, a delicate face, thinly bearded, skeletally thin, more spectre than man, his eyes carrying a glint of watchful, melancholic intelligence. He had the manner and appearance of the young Van Gogh. Timur stood at an angle to the Caliph, observing his child workers. All the boys seemed pale in the harsh light; the air was fetid, low in oxygen.

  The Caliph started speaking in his softest voice, so quietly that everyone had to strain to catch his words, the boys spellbound, wide-eyed with excitement. The Caliph was the alpha and the omega of their existence.

  ‘Lion cubs of the Caliphate,’ he said. ‘After our attacks causing the deaths and injuries of hundreds of the Crusaders, one would expect the cross-worshippers and democratic pagans of the West to pause and contemplate the reasons behind the animosity and enmity held by Muslims for Westerners, and even take heed and consider repentance by abandoning their infidelity. But the fever and delusion caused by sin, superstition and secularism have numbed what is left of their minds and senses. Their hedonistic addictions and heathenish doctrines have enslaved them to false gods, including their clergy, their legislatures and their lusts. As for worshipping the Creator alone and following His Final Messenger, then that is beyond their understanding. Rome’ – his name for the West – ‘wants a war of religion. They kill Muslims. They invade Muslim countries. So be it. We will conquer Rome, break their crosses, enslave their women by the permission of the Exalted One. When we are finished, they will weep for our mercy. We are few, for now. But already the whole world is afraid of us. The reason, my lion cubs, is simple: the management of savagery. There is nothing we will not do to defeat Rome. We are cruel to be pious. Focus is power. To build a true and pious Islamic State in Syria and al-Sham, we must hyper-focus on the management of savagery, as the scholar Abu Bakr Naji has written. We must be remorseless with our enemies. And our traitors, too.’

  A murmur of consternation amongst the boys: Traitors? What traitors?

  ‘The heart is another sign, linked heavily to the tongue,’ the Caliph continued. ‘Unlike other living beings, man is the most capable of eloquently conveying the content of his heart. He is even able to convey otherwise, by deceiving and betraying others, as is the character of hypocrites. To manufacture suicide vests in our factory here, quality control is most important. It’s wrong to send a pious martyr, a shaheed, to his death, to Paradise, only for him to discover that his detonator or the explosive doesn’t work, for him alone to die or, even worse, for him to be captured, turned around or exhibited as a prize fool because of a technical failure. Or, less bad than not working but still a major problem, premature ignition. What is the use of a suicide bomber if he blows up only himself? Rome will laugh at us. After a while it became obvious to the shura’ – the high command of the Caliphate – ‘that the quality of the vests from this, our most important factory, was poor, that one in ten, then one in three was not working. We are far fewer than the enemy. At Mosul, the second city of Iraq and the scene of our greatest victory, there were eighteen hundred of us and we defeated an Iraqi army of thirty thousand in the city, three hundred thousand in all of Iraq. The Americans had spent forty billion dollars on this army. The Iraqi army ran away from our most powerful weapon; the suicide bombs this factory produced. For the attack on Mosul we sent in twenty, thirty shaheed to attack army posts, and the enemy became so afraid of our fearlessness they stripped off their uniforms and fought with each other, the better to hide from our swords.’

  Not too far off came the thud of explosions, the sound muffled by the rock but the shock waves still transmitted through it. The electric lights flickered momentarily and the Caliph paused to take a glass of heavily sugared mint tea from a boy servant. He took a sip and continued.

  ‘They lost and we won because they have been seduced by the Satan of modernity. Our enemies are Rome and the moderns – Muslims who have turned from the true path to embrace the seductions of modernity. In this war, our savagery is our great shield. So if our suicide vests do not explode, our enemies will no longer fear us. And another factor we must reflect on is the cost. In the last twelve months, we exploded six hundred and fifteen car bombs. The explosives we use cost a great deal of money, around sixty million dollars a year . . .’

  There was something not just actuarial but miserly about the way the Caliph spat out the figure – that he hated expense, he hated the monetary cost of jihad. Blood was to be spilt; treasure to be hoarded.

  ‘At least there is no major problem with ignition failure in our car bombs. But here, in our most precious suicide bomb factory, there is, we now discover, a lurking serpent in our bosom.’

  The boys looked at each other, wondering which of them might be the traitor.

  ‘Faced with this slithering thing that crawls on its belly, hiding in our midst, pretending to be with jihad but actually working for the Crusader-Jews, working for Rome, we asked our dear brother Timur al-Shishani to investigate. He drew up a chart of successful detonations, premature ignitions and failed detonations. And only then did our error become obvious. Out of three hundred possible suicide-vest detonations, there were five premature ignitions. And eighty-six failed detonations. Someone in this factory is deliberately ruining active detonators.’

  The lion cubs gasped in shock. Who was the traitor?

  ‘Our brother al-Shishani studied you boys on the assembly line, all dutiful, all pious, all able to remember great lengths of the Quran, the Hadiths. Al-Shishani is a great bomb-maker and he is cunning. He laid a trap for the traitor. He noisily discovered, then brandished, a faulty detonator which he had previously painted with an ultraviolet pen. He placed it in a box on his workbench, for everyone to see. Then he disappeared for a few days. On his return today, he discovered that the faulty detonator had been placed in a vest, the better to foil our jihad. But the creeping, crawling thing that did this was no match for our intelligence. Switch off all the lights.’

  Instantly, all the lights died, apart from one candle, flickering at th
e Caliph’s feet, held by the guard.

  ‘In my hand is a UV light. Stand up, lion cubs, stand in line, and show me your hands. The innocent have nothing to fear. Those with guilt on their hands, they will be revealed.’

  The Caliph stepped down from the raised pedestal of rock, followed by Khalil, his scimitar held vertical in his hands, its blade menacing in the candlelight. The lion cubs were in three rows, roughly thirty boys in each row, each boy holding out his hands. The culprit was in the middle of the second row. The moment the Caliph shone the UV light on him, his guilt was evident: on his hands, in his eyes. Khalil grabbed Haroun by the ear with one hand, causing him to sob with pain. Someone switched the lights back on as the Caliph walked back towards the pedestal of rock, Khalil following him, dragging Haroun along by his ear.

  Haroun was, always had been, Timur’s prime suspect: clever, aloof, the best and the most imaginative worker, but the most rebellious, an intricacy of trouble, through and through. Haroun dropped to his knees, watching, strangely cold-eyed, unfeeling.

  ‘Has the traitor anything to say?’ asked the Caliph, staring not at Haroun but into the crowd.

  Haroun’s high-pitched voice piped up as clearly as the muezzin’s call at dawn: ‘Sir, I was told to change the detonator by another boy. If I didn’t, he told me he would kill me.’

  The Caliph turned his gaze to Haroun, screaming at him: ‘You lie!’

  ‘No sir, it’s the truth. I swear.’ There was something so cold, so contained about Haroun’s speech that it made it impossible to consider that he might be lying. If he was lying, then he was diabolically good at it.

  ‘Which boy told you to switch the detonator?’

  Haroun pointed his finger at the tallest, biggest boy in the room, more man than child. His name was Abdul, he was heavy-featured, sausage-fingered, thickset turning to fat, fully eleven and three-quarter years old.

  ‘It was him, sir.’