by John Sweeney
‘What do you think of this gas that we have found, Timur?’
Timur said, softly, ‘Allahu Akbar’ – God is great.
This was a pious answer, but Hadeed sensed that Timur, yet again, was holding something back from him.
‘Allahu Akbar,’ Hadeed echoed, then clicked his fingers, ordering the others to leave. He barked at Haroun, still capering around in the gas mask, to take it off, and told them all that what they had seen was a secret, not to be whispered about. Then Hadeed, Khalil and Haroun exited the main chamber and returned to the tunnel. They mounted their motorbikes, and the tunnel shook with the roar of their engines, headlights spearing the dark, and soon all that Timur could see were brake lights dwindling to red dots. Then they, too, died – and the last murmur of the machines faded to stillness. He stood in the dark, not moving, and at length turned and headed back towards the barrels of poison and the three human beings in iron cages, gifts for him to experiment on.
NORTHERN ALBANIA
Solemn as a high priest, the boy was as thin as a stick, around ten years of age, walnut-brown. How he found the stone shack belonging to Sotir, the half-wolf shepherd, high up in the mountains where Agim had gone to ground, they never discovered. He knocked twice on the wooden door, and when Sotir opened it the boy said nothing but reached into his pocket, brought out a strange lump of rock and held it in the flat of his palm.
Sotir, puzzled, took the rock, thanked the boy, closed the door behind him and showed it to Agim who, while still full of aches and pains, was on the mend. The detective took one look at the lump of rock and knew that, in the age of the cell phone, of texting and email, Zeke, who did not dare communicate with him by any of those marvels of twenty-first-century digital technology, was letting him know by this gift of fulgurite that he was alive. He could not help but suppress a smile. Once again, the American idiot had proved himself to be no idiot at all.
The half-wolf had been gone for hours. Agim nursed a cup of cold tea and added an unnecessary fresh pine log to the wood-burning stove that super-heated the shack. The wind soughed its melancholy song outside. He shivered, despite the warmth. Where were they? What had gone wrong this time? The snow-capped mountains above turned pink and then a darker shade of red, and only then did he hear it, the sound of a badly maintained sewing machine. He pressed his face against the small, grimy window and made out two figures on an ancient, underpowered motorbike, the half-wolf at the handlebars, behind him a passenger wrapped in a sheepskin coat. Agim swung open the door, and half-ran to the motorbike to get Zeke into the warmth of the shack as quickly as possible. To say the CIA man was in a bad way was an understatement: his face was as grey as a wet newspaper, his breathing erratic, not just his nose but his lips and lower face a darkening blue. As Sotir and Agim gently laid him down on the rough bed inside the shack, a dry rattle came from his throat, his eyes rolled in their sockets and he lost consciousness.
Agim looked searchingly at the half-wolf, and the shepherd’s eyes looked down. Nothing needed to be said.
PALMYRA, SYRIA
The North Koreans were beyond strange, their regime ungodly, but their technicians were not fools, Timur reflected. He’d read that they’d exploded three nuclear bombs, buying the know-how from a rogue Pakistani scientist. They’d managed to launch a rocket across the Sea of Japan and for it to fall in the north Pacific. So they knew what they were doing. To build a chemical-weapon testing facility inside a rock vault with no egress, no way to purge the facility, was foolish, and that was not like them.
Reflecting on this problem, his ears pricked up as he heard a muted cry come from the direction of the three cages holding Rashid, the woman and the boy. Ignoring that, he examined the exterior of the hut where the four bodies of the dead men remained, untouched, their faces almost imperceptibly turned from deathly white to the palest of greens. The hut was placed against the wall of the cavern. Using a flashlight, he saw what he was looking for: an extraction funnel sitting just below the roof of the hut’s sealed chamber. Lining the wall beyond the hut were boxes and boxes of chemical warfare suits and gas masks, all marked in Korean. Manically, he pulled away box after box, letting them fall higgledy-piggledy until he exposed a small circular steel plate set into the wall, flush with the ground. He worked through the boxes, examining the markings on the side, ripped one open, took out a chemical suit and tried it on, but it was too short, even for him. Again he trawled through the boxes, found one that would fit him, and then donned it and a gas mask. Fully fitted out, he unscrewed the bolts fastening the small steel door and opened it.
In front of him was a ladder. Crouching down, he wriggled his way through the hole and started climbing. Two hundred and seventy-three steps later – he’d counted every one – he came to a small platform, and above that a second cylindrical plate, identical to the one far below. The plate was easily unscrewed, and it opened on a hinge to reveal a bowl of stars.
Timur climbed up, sat on a rock overlooking a dark mass of mountains and – in the near distance – the dim lights of Palmyra, and breathed deeply of the warm night air. It should have been a moment of calm and rest, but his mind churned with guilt. He’d watched, immobile, as they had beheaded an innocent child in front of his eyes – and then, when a woman of the Book, who’d only come to Syria to help fight sickness, asked for his mercy, he’d done nothing to help her.
‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’
Timur had read a book arguing that – although it was possible to allow one’s mind to submit to a sacralised determinism; for one’s soul to be taken over and constricted by a new vocabulary, restricting feeling and thought; to live inside a policed reality – what someone had experienced and known in the time before submission would, occasionally, break the mental surface, puncturing their subjected, quiescent mental state. Every time a line or an image from Macbeth, a play that had been read aloud to him when he was a child, pinged inside his head, it weakened the thought control exercised by Islamic State.
He repeated the line from Macbeth and made his decision.
Everything alive crawled into shade, away from the unbearable heat. In direct sunlight, it was 45 degrees Celsius. Even in shadow, the sun’s brilliant glare hurt the eyes. Khalid and Haroun were playing chess in a tea shop in Palmyra, surrounded by tourist bric-a-brac – stuffed toy camels, mini pyramids containing different layers of coloured sand, plastic scimitars, all of them covered in a fine film of sand – for which there were no customers, or to be more accurate, not the right kind of customers. The executioner towered over Haroun, his forearms almost as thick as the boy’s torso, but in front of the chessboard his forehead was knitted in a comic display of concentration.
Overhead, a trio of Russian fighter jets ripped up grooves of sound in the blue sky, delivering presents from Zoba. The bombs fell close – three, four miles away. They saw the smoke first, then almost immediately they felt the earth quiver under their feet, birds flapped and car alarms squawked and only then did they hear the explosions.
The boy moved his knight, said ‘checkmate’ and smiled, coolly, at the loser. Khalid, taken entirely by surprise, swept the board with an enormous paw and cried out, ‘This is the work of Satan!’ then made to strike the boy. Hadeed, sipping tea at a separate table with Timur, lifted one hand upwards and said, ‘Khalil, la.’ No.
The executioner stood up and barrelled out of the teashop, his muscle and mass no competition for the authority of Hadeed. They had been waiting for a reply from the Caliph for more than a week now, waiting for his permission to use the devil’s gas, and were beginning to tire of each other’s company.
To ask the Caliph for his religious judgement about whether or not they could fight jihad with the chemical weapons they had found, the simplest thing would have been for Hadeed to have used his cell phone to call the Caliph or his office. But that was forbidden. Instead, Hadeed had written out a letter in longhand and copied the video of the gassing of the four men ont
o a second phone, and given the letter and phone to one of the guards, who got on his motorbike to make the trip back to Raqqa. The problem, they intuited, was that the guard, not so very high in the pecking order, was clearly finding it difficult to locate the Caliph – or, if he had done so, to compete with all the other petitioners to enter his presence, to capture ten seconds of his time, so that he could show him Hadeed’s letter and the video. The goal of Islamic State was to turn back the clock to the seventh century. In terms of speed of communication, they were doing rather too well.
The logic of no phone calls to and from Caliph Ibrahim was sound enough. ISIS were fully aware of what had happened to the Chechen warlord Dzhokhar Dudayev back in the nineties. Dudayev had been beyond the reach of Russian spies, living with the goats high up in the Pankisi Gorge, part of the Caucasus mountain range and halfway to Georgia, when the Russians sent two cruise missiles whistling down onto Dudayev’s satellite-phone signal. For a movement that used suicide as a weapon – very much part of its philosophy of the management of savagery – the delicacy surrounding the security of the Caliph himself was extraordinary. Still, they all understood the importance, the centrality, of submission to his God-given authority.
Haroun wandered off somewhere. Hadeed looked at his watch, stifled a yawn and moved over to pick up the chess pieces and align them on the board. When he was done, he suggested a game to Timur. The Chechen engineer nodded politely, but soon they had thrown diffidence to one side and were hard at battle: Hadeed was white, advancing his knights in daring adventures; Timur constructed a prickly defence of pawns in depth, castling queenside, then sending three pawns up on the king’s side, setting up a relentless momentum of sacrifice that looked unsophisticated at first glance but wasn’t at all.
The Iraqi mulled the board, sipped his tea, then spoke: ‘The prisoners, Timur, what did you do with the prisoners – Rashid, the woman and the child?’
‘For the moment, nothing. They are secure in the vault.’
‘So you say,’ mused Hadeed.
‘And I say the truth. God knows it.’
‘Of course, to a traitor to our cause, a pretence of piety would be the perfect way to mask his inner feelings.’
‘That would indeed be most cunning,’ replied Timur, before taking a bishop for the loss of a pawn. Hadeed made a sour face, moved his queen forwards.
‘The traitor,’ said Hadeed, warming to his theme, ‘would have to be most ingenious, seeming to be a dutiful, pious servant of the Caliphate. But in reality he would be planning a trap.’
‘Such a plan as you suggest, it is beyond imagining,’ replied Timur.
‘But if there were two traitors, one who had cleverly constructed the fantastic scheme of piety, and the second, a mere opportunist, who saw through it but was ready for betrayal for his own personal reasons, what then?’
Timur stared at Hadeed, then moved a knight, catching the Iraqi off guard.
‘Checkmate,’ said Timur.
At that precise moment, there was a slight, childish cough, then Haroun emerged from behind an antique Persian carpet – on sale, so its price tag said, for three thousand dollars.
They came for Timur at the traditional time, in the small hours of the morning, as he knew they would: Hadeed, Khalil, three Hisbah. Timur made no protest but simply smiled weakly.
‘Do you not ask why?’ asked Hadeed, as Khalil bound Timur’s wrists with the plastic handcuffs donated so generously to ISIS by the American taxpayer – via the mechanism of the Iraqi army running away from Mosul.
‘Clearly,’ said Timur, ‘I have been most unwise.’
‘Rashid, the woman and the boy, they were moderns’ – the dismissive term the servants of the Caliphate used for those who did not submit to their own dark interpretation of the Quran – ‘fit only for death. They have vanished. There were guards at the entrance to the tunnel. They saw you leave once in the truck.’
‘The guards searched the truck and found nothing but four corpses. I was taking the dead away to bury them. That is no crime.’
Khalil slammed him down on a chair and slapped him on the face, three times.
‘Your crime is treason,’ said Hadeed.
‘So you say,’ replied Timur. It was enough to inspire more blows from Khalil, most to the head, some to the stomach, winding him.
‘Timur, you think your little ploy of leaving the hatch on top of the rock open worked? We found the barber and he talked, didn’t he, Khalil?’
The executioner stood behind Timur, massaging his neck, his cheekbones, then lightly caressing his eyeballs. Timur breathed in hard, saying nothing.
‘The barber came to our attention. Before rogues and pagans flee from the saintly state we have created, he would clip their beards. People talked and we seized him. Under interrogation he told us that a thin man with a Chechen accent six days ago had come to him and bought the clippings of a beard for five dollars – too good a price, too generous a deal. You smuggled Rashid, the woman and boy out underneath the dead, and you bought the beard from the barber so the woman could disguise herself as a man. Very ingenious. But treason.’
‘So you say,’ said Timur.
The pressure on his eyeballs grew.
THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Huddled in the cold, they sat in the ruins of an Orthodox church, listening to the sea lap against the shingle a few yards away. Darkness cloaked the land; out to sea, to the west, the phosphorescence of the surf gave way to blackness, then, seven miles away, the brilliant lights of Kos lured them to a different world. Seated in the nave of the church, they could take in the stars because it was roofless, abandoned in 1922 when a new and powerful Turkey banished the Greek Christian citizens who had lived and died on these shores for a thousand years. A sense of wars, lost and won, of ordinary people crushed underfoot by forces more powerful than them, of the innocent seeking refuge, lingered in its old, comfortless stones.
Jameela’s hair was cut short, like a man’s. She was wearing a black sweater over a white T-shirt and blue jeans; warm enough for Syria, but far too cold on the edge of the great inland sea in the bleak hours before dawn. The breeze strengthened and the masses in the church and the hillside beyond shivered afresh. Five hundred people, all of them running from war. Ham was physically puffed up because of the life jacket he was wearing, but the boy within was shivering. Still, he was the same old Ham.
‘Mom,’ he piped up in English, ‘you promised me Pirates of the Caribbean. Not this pile of crap.’
Jameela, worried sick as she was about the sea-crossing ahead of them, could not help but laugh. A thin man with cropped silver hair, the head of a large family, hissed in Arabic, ‘Tell your boy to cease his chatter. He’ll bring the police down on us and then we will never get to Germany.’
‘Mom, please,’ Ham mock-whined, ‘tell that asshole the killer whales in Sea World get treated better than this.’
The thin man didn’t speak English, or at least not well enough to work out that Ham was being far from polite about him. But there was real anger in his voice now: ‘Listen, woman, the people-smugglers will hear your brat show off in English and they’ll order us off the beach, and all of us will lose thousands of dollars because of him.’
The thin man had a point. She had paid the smugglers $2,400 for two tickets for herself and Ham; there was no way they could afford to lose that money.
‘If he doesn’t shut up,’ the thin man hissed, ‘I’ll take my belt to his backside.’
The colonel’s daughter in Jameela came out of nowhere: ‘You touch a hair on my boy’s head and I will slit your throat,’ she replied in the guttural Arabic of the backstreets of her home town of Aleppo. The man held his tongue. In ISIS-land she would never have dared to say such a thing to a man. But now that she was on the edge of Europe, she felt free to speak her mind – and that was a kind of liberation. Nevertheless, she turned to her son and hugged him tightly and whispered into his ear, ‘Ham, you’ve got to pretend that this is the Pi
rates of the Caribbean, for real. The baddies are after us, so we’ve got to be very, very quiet.’
‘I’ll be Jack Sparrow,’ Ham said. ‘Where is the Black Pearl?’
‘It’s coming, honey, it’s coming.’
Ham fell silent at that, and put his hand in his mother’s. Soon they could make out the sound of an engine. The hillside stiffened. Was this the Turkish police? But there was something about the slow, unhurried build-up of sound that didn’t suggest the agents of law and order on the move. By the light of the stars, they could just make out a truck, using its sidelights only, coming around a bend. It trundled along a track that dipped below the church and came to a stop a few yards from the beach. Ghostly shapes got out and started unloading big boxes, dumping them close by the waves.
As if to mock the refugees’ anxiety about making too much noise, the sound of the smugglers ripping open the cardboard boxes could be heard for miles. Someone flashed a light, and then they heard a petrol-driven compressor start up, its clatter further assaulting the quiet of the night. A flashlight beam cut through the darkness, illuminating a pump forcing air into a large grey tube, two feet around, which morphed into a U-shaped inflatable, thirty feet by seven. The smugglers placed the flattened-out cardboard boxes on its bottom, to give it a semblance of a keel.
The people on the hillside started gathering up their belongings and slowly, then more hurriedly, making their way down to the beach. The smugglers knew their business. Soon, seven inflatables lay half-in, half-out of the water. A few of the refugees tried to get on board but the smugglers snapped at them in Turkish to stay back. One by one, the inflatables were taken into the sea and a smuggler would go to the truck and return with a small electric outboard motor.
The first inflatable was ready. A couple of smugglers held it steady while fifty, sixty, seventy people crowded on, then one smuggler sitting at the stern opened up the electric outboard and with the softest of buzzing, barely audible, the inflatable slipped into the darkness, towards the bright lights of Kos. What the rest of the people waiting on the beach didn’t see was that one hundred yards out, the smuggler at the outboard stood up, nudged a young Syrian sitting next to him, pointed his arm straight out directly towards Kos, then suddenly backflipped into the sea and started swimming powerfully back to the beach.
