Rotten Gods

by Greg Barron

  Zhyogal has not slept for more than a few hours in six days, and little in the week prior to that. Still he is alert, pacing the conference room, staring, assessing. Looking down at his body, he knows that he has lost five or more kilograms. The toll of these days has been heavy. In spite of this, his gaze is always outwards, looking for any threat to the success of this chapter of the jihad he has devoted his life to fighting.

  A sixth sense — a biological antenna fine-tuned over a dozen missions — tells him that something is afoot. The building is too quiet, and the kufr security people have ceased their regular and pointless requests for him to release hostages. Looking around the room he checks that his men are at their stations and awake. One is not to be seen, and he walks in that direction.

  From the beginning he recognised Jafar Zartosht as, morally, the weakest of the mujahedin. Not just because he is not African, nor an original member of the group that fought in Algeria and Nigeria. There are other signs. Even his excess weight indicates a man who overindulges, in defiance of the Prophet’s strictures against gluttony. There has been no sign of unreliability from the man, but now, at this crucial time, he is not at his post — possibly off in some nook, sleeping.

  As Zhyogal moves around a row of chairs he sees one of the delegates stand, look around, then move down to the end of the row. At first he assumes that the man is moving to the bathrooms, but there is something self-conscious about the way he walks, as though he is frightened of discovery.

  Ducking his head behind the cover of some seats, Zhyogal waits, then follows as the dark figure slips through to the end of the row and on towards the wall. Now, sure that the man is a threat in some way, he eases the safety catch off the Norinco 9mm in his right hand.

  Ahead is a cleaner’s room. The man opens the door and moves inside. A few paces behind, Zhyogal moves quickly. Running now, gripping the handle. The interior light is on, and an electrical locker wide open. He feels a flash of fear. He had not thought of this.

  The frightened face of the man turns towards him, arm extended to the switchboard. Zhyogal recognises him now — one of the Brazilian delegation. Zhyogal pulls the trigger twice, aiming for the centre of the chest, watching the man slump against the wall and slide down to the floor in a pool of his own blood.

  Isabella knows that the only way to avoid what seems inevitable is to fight.

  ‘No,’ she shrieks, pushing Jafar away with one hand in the middle of his chest. He staggers back, face twisting with surprise. Seconds pass as she tries to brush past him to the door but finds her neck held in a vice grip between his thumb and forefinger, as hard and strong as steel. His face is close to hers, eyes screwed into dark slits.

  ‘Bitch,’ he hisses. ‘Slut.’

  The gunshots register on the monitors, and Abdullah feels an icy fear. He turns to the others. ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Gunshot, from the eastern side.’

  ‘Our man is discovered?’

  ‘It must be so.’

  Abdullah depresses the trigger of the microphone. ‘Abort, abort,’ he cries, with a desperation born of the knowledge that less than a kilometre away, a young sharpshooter has Dr Abukar in his sights, and killing him now will achieve nothing but the slaughter of hostages in retaliation and the ability of another terrorist to detonate the charges.

  ‘Ta-maam — OK,’ come the replies, one after the other.

  Abdullah turns to the assembled control room. ‘I am sorry to say that the operation has been cancelled.’

  No man or woman in that room can hold his eyes.

  Isabella fights the Iranian with every muscle. Kicking and punching. Forcing him to hold her.

  His face is close to hers, red with fury and desire. ‘You were looking at me. You want me.’

  ‘You misunderstood.’

  ‘No.’

  His hand resumes its movement. In response she jams her thighs together but he uses his finger like a crowbar. Isabella cries out in pain. His mouth closes on her neck.

  Again he forces her up against the wall. His hands are at his own clothing, and now, even more certain that she is about to be raped, she redoubles her efforts. He slams her head against the tiled wall.

  The door opens, and Isabella watches over Jafar’s shoulder as Zhyogal enters the room. His shirt is splattered with droplets of fresh blood and she smells the stink of a recently discharged handgun.

  ‘Jafar,’ he snaps, ‘you neglect your duty. An attempt was made in your area to access an electrical panel. The consequences might have been disastrous.’ Only then does the leader seem to understand what he is seeing — the dishevelled, open clothing. ‘You insult God. If I did not need you I would put a bullet in your skull now.’

  Jafar’s reaction is immediate. Turning, babbling his apologies in Arabic, he lets Isabella slump to the tiled floor where she lies, sobbing with disgust and loathing.

  From 07:30 onwards, local time, the Rabi al-Salah crisis is drop-kicked from the headlines by breaking news from Bangladesh and the West Bengal region of India, where Tropical Cyclone Zahir has struck, bringing winds up to 285 kilometres per hour. A storm surge combines with the already high water levels along the Ganges Delta, where river tendrils run down to the sea from multiple mouths, held at bay by sandbags and home-made earthworks. It is clear, even in the early stages, that a disaster of biblical proportions is underway.

  The BBC World Service begins its broadcast with a heartfelt oration from the newsreader.

  ‘There are times when the world stops. The 9/11 attacks; the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004; the Haiti earthquake; the Pakistan floods of 2010; and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Now, on the heels of the disaster of Rabi al-Salah, Cyclone Zahir has broken levees, already straining to hold back the sea, and all the clever silt works have come to nothing in the face of a devastation that defies belief. The meteorological station at Chittagong measured wind gusts of two hundred and sixty-eight kilometres per hour before the equipment failed. What was not blown away is now under water. An inland sea has turned much of Bangladesh and West Bengal into a new Atlantis. A land that may never see human feet again.’

  Both Indian and Bangladeshi meteorological offices issued a series of warnings yet most of the population chose to stay and trust the levees that their governments had assured them would stand up to rising sea levels. Those who did attempt to leave overwhelmed the available transport and found themselves trapped.

  SKY News has a chopper in the region, showing footage from a dawn flight over Tazumuddin where a ten-metre-high storm surge has filled fifteen thousand square miles of land like a bathtub, apparently within hours. The cameras focus on human bodies washed with other flood debris against the tops of drowned trees. Once the levees were breached there was no going back.

  Across the Ganges Delta the result is similar. The UN’s Bangladesh agency reports that up to five million villagers may have perished. Eighteen million more are on the march, streaming towards high ground.

  India closes its borders, lining the barbed-wire fence with men with machine guns and armoured personnel carriers. Tensions mount. The United States announces Operation Sea Angel II, despatching a full amphibious task force, pledging an initial one hundred million dollars in aid. Other nations follow suit.

  The world mourns. Archbishops, cardinals, and ministers pray. Financial markets plumb unexplored depths. Speculators leap from windows. Boards of public corporations meet to discuss ‘strategies’ and ‘harm minimisation’, in the face of this latest threat to stability and profits.

  Marika is not sure how long she has been asleep, but remembers at least one refuelling stop, in some Saudi base, where she lifted her head to the sound of men carrying hoses and shouting all those minor operational commands that ensure protocol is followed even in the most difficult conditions. Hours of silence before they took to the air once more, but she was content to sleep — a state where she no longer needed to think, to feel, to care.

  Waking now, she looks at
the gas fires far below, burned off from the oil wells. The flames have a beauty that is both temporary and ethereal. Flames that will soon pass from the earth as the brief, dangerous, Age of Oil draws to a close. An age of carbon monoxide, lead, gridlock, and deep-water oil wells pumping poison into a sea already dying a slow death from overfishing, storm water runoff, and neglect.

  Something new is coming, something that might be an ending or a beginning for a world predicted to bulge under the strain of population growth that threatens to see the equivalent of two more Chinas walk the planet, two and a half billion more people by 2050.

  Marika reaches out to take Sufia’s hand. ‘Hello.’

  Sufia turns. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘Yes. We have passed the oasis of Liwa, and are now over the region of Ramlat al-Hamra. Soon we will be there.’

  ‘Thank you. Have you slept?’

  ‘Not yet. There will be time for sleep later. Something terrible has happened, the pilot came to tell me. In Bangladesh a cyclone has flooded the Ganges Delta. The sea has risen over the levees. Many millions might have died.’

  Marika takes her hand away. A tear drips down her cheek. More lives. More nameless men, women, and children on the march to oblivion, praying and doing their best and trusting that somewhere, someone cares.

  ‘Madoowbe is dead,’ she says, ‘but he is just one of millions.’

  In the darkness of that aircraft, Marika confronts a question she has avoided through the past days. Something that goes deep into the dark kitchen dresser shelves of her soul, where memories are stacked like delicate china plates.

  Where the hell is God in all this?

  God. The Creator. The God of Saint Anne’s Catholic Church, Mitchell Street, Bondi. The God of morning tea with trestle tables in the hall laid with scones with jam and cream, and instant coffee in foam cups, and Irina Marquez showing off her three-month-old baby. The God of incense burners, collection plates, paschal candles, and Father Murphy’s veined, red face and white hair. The God of sunshine on the sea after Mass and the twinkling multifaceted diamond stabs of light on the eyes accustomed to the darkness inside. The dark side of the church. Sexual abuse. Where is God when a priest rapes a child? Why would He send our species out into the world so perfectly evolved physically, yet so flawed in our minds and emotions?

  Where the hell is He now? Is Madoowbe right — are they all rotten?

  In Africa, more people will die. Millions more. And if Zhyogal and his cohorts succeed, a hundred million souls will live under the heel of another god sick with arrogance and jealousy.

  There, in the rocking aircraft, Marika thinks of Madoowbe. The unusual beauty of his face. With all her heart she wishes she could see him again. Just one more time.

  ‘Are you thinking about him?’ Sufia asks.

  ‘Yes. He was a special person, but it took a while for me to understand that.’

  ‘I think so too. I would have liked to get to know him.’

  ‘You had a hard life,’ Marika says. ‘Madoowbe told me all of it — how you fled drought and famine for the coast in trucks sent by Siad Barre.’

  To her surprise, Sufia throws back her head and laughs.

  Marika lets go her hand and frowns. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘You know I told you that my family often mentioned Madoowbe after he left us?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He was most remembered for one thing — his stories. Always he made things up to entertain his friends and family. We did not escape famine in trucks — never went near the coast. Our father was a trader in Bacaadweyn. He sold nails and saws. Ali went to live with my uncle in Somaliland when he was eight or nine so he could go to school.’

  ‘Then Madoowbe was not a herdboy?’

  ‘Not that I am aware of.’

  Marika shakes her head and smiles also. Thinking of him, she watches out the window as desert gives way to coast. The lights of Abu Dhabi loom below, then Jebel Ali, and, as dawn turns the Persian Gulf to glistening silver, Dubai itself.

  The first officer calls back more breaking news — a dozen delegates at Rabi al-Salah have agreed to sign confessions and will be released at noon today, well ahead of the deadline. There is a faint feeling of sickness and pity as Marika turns back to the window, and the impossible shining glory of one of the most extravagant agglomerations of modern architecture on earth.

  The city seems false, as if the tactile world is out in the open spaces and desert sands of Africa, and the flooded Ganges Delta. Dubai is not real — the wealth that created it was an illusion that sucked badly needed resources from the entire region — brought untold thousands of a mostly male workforce from the subcontinent to labour in the hot sun from dawn to dusk, building, cleaning, even dusting the leaves of outdoor plants in the city’s showpiece locations. Indentured labourers treated with contempt and exploited, trying to scrape together money to send home, yet many not able to afford a return fare, trapped in the workers’ slums of Dubai, trapped with the debt they incurred just to get over there.

  ‘Almost there,’ she says to Sufia. She pauses and swallows. ‘Will you do what we discussed now — will you talk to your husband?’

  ‘Yes, I will talk to him.’

  ‘He is wrong to do what he plans to do. The others will not let him act with honour. They want martyrdom and death.’

  Sufia’s eyes lock on hers. They are a perfect brown. No flecks, no variation. ‘Perhaps you are right.’

  ‘I know I am. Please, don’t let Madoowbe suffer in vain. Will you help?’

  ‘I will talk to my husband, and then I will try to sway him.’

  ‘Do you mind if I call ahead and tell them that, so they are ready?’

  ‘No, of course not. Go ahead.’

  Not long after she makes the call on the aircraft communications equipment, the first officer warns them, ‘We’re going down. Make sure you’re strapped in, OK?’

  The chopper settles to the earth, rocking like an impatient horse, and Marika grips the seat hard, staring out the window at the Rabi al-Salah Centre below, the helipad’s blue tarmac surrounded by lawn and landscaped garden. She has always hated landing in these things — it just seems so bloody unnatural. Besides, every minute, every second, counts now.

  The twin skids touch the deck. Rotors slow and doors open. Marika understands just how tired she is as the world swims around her and the early sun blinds her. The men who greet them she recognises as other members of the Rabi al-Salah security force. They look so damned clean, after the people of the desert. They fuss over her and Sufia like roosters over a pair of hens.

  Inside the complex, after the degrading searches and scans, Marika feels a sense of unreality as they walk the corridors again — the last few days seem like a lifetime of experience. The shining glass is no attraction, just a distraction from the real business of life that she found in the drought-and famine-ravaged landscape of East Africa.

  Abdullah bin al-Rhoumi meets them in the corridor, looking like he has aged fifteen years. He greets them sagely, and Marika is disappointed at the impersonality of it, considering the rapport she thought she had built up with him. What did you expect, she asks herself, a marching band? A medal?

  Marika introduces the tall Somali woman, a touch of hurt pride in her voice. You might not appreciate what I did, but I went through hell to bring her back. ‘This is Sufia.’

  He bows from the shoulders only; a perfunctory gesture. ‘Very pleased to meet you. We have a room set up where you can talk to your husband.’

  Marika smiles encouragingly at her.

  The room they are shown to has a monitor and camera on a tripod. A seat has been placed near the opposite wall. As Sufia enters, a slim technician rises, smiling. This, Marika realises, is his moment in the sun. Perhaps the only time in his life he will be near the centre of world affairs. He wears grey suit trousers and a white pinstriped business shirt. Thin brown arms extend through the rolled cuffs
like drinking straws. His moustache is neatly trimmed, his eyes small and brown.

  ‘You’re Sufia? Good, good. Now, what we’re going to do is sit you down here and cross you live into the conference room. From there you can deliver your plea to your husband to surrender and let us open the doors. Is that clear?’

  Marika watches Sufia. She has a strange tilt to her chin, yet is smiling. ‘I suppose,’ she says, ‘the signal will go out live to the news networks?’

  ‘Of course. What a moment! Your face will be beamed around the world.’

  Sufia nods again, but Marika sees that she makes no move to sit down.

  The technician hurries around to the back of the chair and holds it ready for her. ‘We have the networks coming on in fifteen seconds, if you would please sit …’

  Sufia shakes her head. ‘No.’

  Abdullah bin al-Rhoumi steps forwards from the doorway. ‘What do you mean, no?’ He points at Marika. ‘That young woman risked her life to bring you in here. You have the chance to save almost a thousand very important people, including your husband.’

  Sufia’s voice is as lifeless as flint. ‘I will not perform like a monkey. I said I will talk to my husband, but I will do it face to face.’

  Abdullah explodes. ‘Face to face? How? In case you haven’t noticed, your husband has locked himself in the most secure room in the history of the world.’

  ‘I have been told that the door will be opened at noon today to let people out. Those who have signed confessions. I will enter the conference room at that point.’

  ‘A thousand times no. How do we know we’re not letting another terrorist in?’

  Marika breaks in, ‘She is not a terrorist. I will vouch for her.’

  Abdullah’s eyes are like brown lasers. ‘Quiet. One unreasonable woman is enough.’

  Sufia crosses her arms over her chest. ‘I will talk to him face to face. No other way.’

  Abdullah pushes his face close to hers. ‘The militants will blow the room at the time of maghrib — sunset — today. According to the al-Alam newspaper, the sun will set at 19:06. That will not give you much time.’