Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (17 page)

“Do you have any proof this man is a member of the Resistance?” asks Bora.

“We do not need proof.  It is better to arrest a hundred innocent men than to let one traitor escape.”

“That doesn't seem particularly efficient.” 

Salima is almost proud of her boss, even if his mild opposition is out of laziness rather than ideology. 

“You will come to our view in the end, Bora,” says Shirzad.  “The Caliphate is more important than the individual.  You will come to see that, too.” 

Shirzad brushes past Salima's desk, and for the first time appears to notice her.  She pretends to be oblivious, pressing a command on the computer keyboard.  The noisy printer begins rattling out a form.  Yes, she's efficient.  She can smell his cologne and wonders for a moment why, if women cannot wear nail polish, men can wear cologne.  She can hear him exhale through his nostrils.  “Why don't you bring your assistant?” Shirzad suggests. 

Bora bristles, casting a protective glance at her, but says nothing.  Prisoner of rank. 

Shirzad continues.  “If we arrest women, she can do the searches and verify their identities.  We leave in one hour.”  Shirzad spins and marches out. 

Salima asks to go to the pharmacy, to pick up a few things.  A guilty Bora nods.  “Be quick about it,” he grumbles.  She dashes to the pharmacy and calls Pim.

Eight cars filled with Landweer
agents and IRH soldiers gather outside.  She is not allowed to ride in a car with the other men, so she gets her own black Touran with her own driver.

The ride takes ninety minutes, the solitude wildly luxurious.  She opens a tray, and half expects to find little bottles of booze, but there is nothing.  Not even water. 

She closes the screen between herself and the driver, takes off her veil, and leans her cheek against the cool window. 

Driving north through the farmland, there is no war, no mosques fingering the sky.  They pass Edam and drive along the dikes.  Windmills spin slowly.  Sheep munch beside the road. 

She tries to come up with a plan for what to do when she gets to Den Helder.  How she can hinder the Landweer?
 
She hopes Pim got word to everyone in town, but knows inevitably someone will not have gotten the message.  She considers faking a seizure when they arrive, but realizes most likely they would ignore her, or order a local woman to tend to her.  She considers grabbing an AK-47 and shooting it into the air.  She can't think of anything that won't blow her cover.

Halfway to their destination, the convoy of Tourans stops at the center square in Alkmaar.  Salima puts on her veil and rolls down the window. 

Friday is the cheese market at Alkmaar.  Sixty thousand pounds of Gouda, Edam, and Leiden are spread across the brick plaza like great yellow checkers on a game board.  Gone are the girls in white-winged cotton hats and wooden clogs.  But some traditions stand.  Men in red-ribboned straw hats carry cheese wheels on red bowed pallets, eight wheels of cheese at a time.  Hundreds of buyers mill around, bidding on cheeses.  Men in white cotton coats plunge instruments into the cheese, and pull out plugs to taste and judge the quality. 

Shirzad is already out of the lead car.  He orders the soldiers to round up everyone and check IDs.  The shoppers scatter; those who aren't quick enough are instructed to form a line.  Shirzad walks up the line, demanding their papers.  He does nothing but take their documents walk behind their backs, and slowly hand them back. 

Although Alkmaar is a Christian town, the women are veiled according to sharia law.  Shirzad orders Salima to verify the women's IDs.  As gently as she can, she asks each woman to drop her niqab and compares her face to her photo ID.  “Hide your cross,” she whispers to one woman, who tucks her pedant under her clothes.

“Are any wearing makeup?” Shirzad asks Salima.

“These are wholesome Dutch women.  They don't need makeup.”

He regards her, thoughtfully.  She is terrified he detected something in her voice.  A sarcasm she didn't intend.  A rock sinks to the bottom of her stomach.  “Very well, then,” he says, flipping his hand in dismissal.

After an hour of fun, the Landweer
and IRH soldiers get back in the cars and head north.

As soon as they arrive in Den Helder, silver threads of sleet plink against the car windows, and hit the pavement and bounce.  Yet dozens of people are scurrying around on their bicycles.  Salima sighs in relief.  They must have gotten word. 

The lead car stops at the ferry depot, a modern one-story building of glass and steel that sits on the water across the channel from the white beaches of Texel.  Apparently the harbor master is the contact.  Shirzad and the others get out and walk inside. 

Glass crashes.  Salima turns and sees a grenade fly through the window and explode. 

For a moment the depot becomes almost weightless, lifted, defying gravity, before it rains down in pieces back to the earth.  Doors fling away from their frames.  Glass windows burst into stalactites.  Bricks tumble, clumps of mortar and powder.  A flame starts in a corner, flicking up a wall.  Outside an automobile catches fire.

The blast travels through Salima's body, throwing her on her ass, fragments of wood flying in every direction.  Light emerges through the dust and smoke.  Hanging rebar and pipes angle to the floor.  The whole front of the building is gone.  Men duck, stumbling out, coughing, clearing away chunks of brick wall and plaster. 

She clamps her palm to her right ear and tries to stand.  Men are shouting, but she can't hear a thing, only a buzzing of a thousand saws.  Blood drips from her nostrils, and she uses her veil to staunch the flood.  A tremendous pressure builds across her forehead; a pounding throbbing pain stabs between her eyes.  She staggers a few feet—she needs air, needs the outside, A
ir!  Give me air!
—then vomits. 

A beam crashes down the middle of the room, sending up a new poof of plaster and dust.

Shirzad is pale, blood from an armless soldier splashed across his chest.  “Dirty
kafir
bastards.  I'll get every one of them.”  He sees Salima.  “Cover your face.  You're indecent.”  She barely hears him, his voice echoing down a long tunnel.  She repeats the words he said in her mind, but doesn't understand his meaning.  He must be telling her something important.  “Salima Sahin!  Cover your face,” he yells.

At first she is surprised he even knows her name.  Then the words sink in.  If her head didn't hurt so much, she would giggle—the thought that her uncovered face would, at this moment, throw the staggering, bleeding men around her into a frenzy of desire, is absurd.  Small splinters of glass make her fingers bleed.  She pulls them out, and rearranges her hijab.

The Landweer
officer who lost an arm lies sprawled in a pool of blood, dead, his face white with dust, his mouth a maroon hole.  Shirzad wipes his face with a handkerchief.  “A martyr for jihad.  God bless him.  May seventy-two virgins suck his cock.”  He throws his handkerchief on the man's face in disgust, and orders the Landweer officers to follow him outside. 

The beams above lurch a foot.  White dust cascades everywhere.

Salima ducks, then runs, her feet crunching over broken glass and plaster.  A vice squeezes her brain, she staggers, aimless, holding her head.  A man grabs her elbow and leads her out, where she vomits again.

Bora has the presence of mind to take her to the nearest hotel to recover.  Hotel Lands End.  The name seems fitting.   

Oblivious to their injuries, Shirzad rounds up the men, and makes the raid to the underground leader's cabin, a large tool shed on a farm between two canals.  They find no one.  Frustrated, the men return to town and make a house-to-house search, upending tables, dumping bookcases, shooting AK-47s into the attics.  Shirzad finds nothing.

Enraged at his failure, he storms back to Amsterdam, leaving Salima and the rest of his staff to take care of the injured and dead.

Of course, someone has to pay.  The next morning Bora comes late to the office, sullen and brooding.  He meets all morning with outside officers.  At noon, he comes back to the office and tells Salima to clear out her desk.  He is out of a job and so is she.

Shirzad is promoted to Supreme Chief of the Landweer, headquartered in The Hague. 

At least he's out of Amsterdam.

Varken Weg

A thick mist, almost a rain, fills the forest.  It is gloomy and cold, a chill rising from the earth like a cold crypt.  Salima and Kaart lead two out-of-shape middle-aged men on a well-traveled part of the Varken Weg, between Vaal and Nijmegen.

Salima wears jeans and boots, and goes unveiled, her burka rolled up in her pack.  While it is highly unlikely she will need it in the forest, she carries it to wear to and from safe houses along the way, and to do shopping when necessary in nearby villages.

She and Kaart have been ordered to escort two scientists from Aachen, Germany up the Varken Weg to Delfzijl, a small town on the coast of Dollart Bay in the far northeast corner of Holland.  Delfzijl is one of the main escape routes for refugees on their way to Denmark.  The trip is 235 miles. 

No refugee hikes the entire Varken Weg, dipping in and out of it.  Salima varies her routes to include biking, canoing through canals, and trains.  Each
postbode
develops his or her own routes, which are never shared, never repeated.

She decides they will take the train part of the way, and hike the Varken Weg around the cities.  When walking, they need to cover twenty miles a day.  She brings extra socks, Vaseline, and mole skin for herself and the refugees.

“Under no circumstances should they be allowed to be recaptured,” orders Gerda.  “Do you understand?”  Her meaning is clear.  In the worst case scenario, Salima may have to execute the very men she is trying to save.  Salima nods, although she has no idea if she has it in her.

“We only have eight hours of sunlight,” Salima tells them before they set out before dawn, “which means we will be doing some night hiking.  We'll be walking single file.  No talking.  The cold and damp will suck the energy out of you, but we must keep going.  Take these walking sticks.  We don't want any twisted ankles.”

Kaart passes her as they enter the forest to lead the first leg.  Slight and dark-haired, he looks far younger than his thirty years.  He rocks when he walk, slightly bowlegged, a rifle slung over his shoulder. 

“Do you know how to use that thing?” Salima asks.

“I've shot it once or twice.”

“Did you hit anything?”

“Sure I hit something.  Just not what I was aiming at.”

“That's reassuring.”

The forest is somewhat warmer, but the moist cold is still bone-chilling.  The path is slick, wet leaves slipping under their feet, twigs snapping.  The moon slips behind wispy clouds, leaving them in near-total darkness.  Kaart leads on, followed by the two scientists.  Salima brings up the rear.

Wildlife thrives in the untended land.   Apart from the long-tusked boar, there are deer, rabbit, squirrels, hedgehogs, bats, stoats, martens, foxes, wild dogs.   Refugees and animals aren't the only ones to use the forested corridor. 
Locals hunt, and gather mushrooms and berries.  Once smugglers discovered IRH soldiers wouldn't go near the road of buried pigs, they began to use it as a highway for moving contraband. 

Salima hears labored breathing, notices that one of the scientists is limping, and orders a rest.  “Let me take a look at your foot.”

The scientist reluctantly takes off his shoe.  For some reason, he hands it to her.

It reeks, the interior sole covered in blood.  She nearly throws it in the bushes.  “For Chrissake!  Why did you wear these?”  She examines the offending foot apparel—polished maroon cordovan leather, rounded missile toes, smooth leather soles.  “Did you think we were taking you for Tango lessons?
”

“They are the best shoes I own.  I didn't want to leave them.”  His face looks crushed, like a school boy.  “They're not dancing shoes,” he says weakly.  “They're dress shoes.”

“In case we stop in Stockholm for your Nobel prize?  A Nobel prize in stupidity.”

“Lina,” Kaart warns.  “Give the guy a break.  He's probably never been out of the lab.”  Kaart is also annoyed, although he hides it better.

“It'll slow us down.  Completely preventable.  It could easily cost us our lives.” 

Salima pulls off his bloodied sock.  “Hold the flashlight,” she says, handing the light to Kaart.  A blister has broken on his heel and become infected, with red streaks shooting up his ankle.  “Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?”

“I'm tired of being a burden.”

“Oh, for chrissake.  I thought you said you were a walker.  You should know better then to neglect your feet.”

“I didn't think it was that bad.  I have a high threshold for pain.”

“Didn't you think for a moment that maybe the pain was trying to tell you something?”  She taps out antibiotics from a small brown bottle, and hands him her canteen, then sets to cleaning and bandaging.  Part of the problem was his bulky white socks.  She digs out a pair of finely woven thermal hiking socks from her pack, and carefully slips one on his foot.