Rotten Gods (51 page)

Zhyogal, however, wears a sudden and terrifying expression on his face: fear that someone might snatch the moment of glory away from him.

Ali tries to turn but already Zhyogal is coming for him. With a thrust of outstretched hands he attempts to push him away but the Algerian is too strong. At first Ali thinks that the other man is trying to hurt him, but instead the focus of Zhyogal's strength and determination is the carbon fibre trigger that Ali takes from his pocket and holds in his hand.

‘Push the switch,' Zhyogal shouts. ‘Let it end the way God wills it to end for us.'

Ali knows now that he cannot kill the woman he loves. Cannot allow her beautiful face to feel shrapnel and pain. Here in this room are other men and women who love also.
This is not the way
, he wants to shout.
I was wrong.

The strength of the other man, however, is too much — his fingers have the power of pliers and he uses them to prise away Ali's grip on the switch, a knee on his chest. Now Ali knows that he is seconds from death, and his wonderful, beautiful Sufia …

 

PJ moves through the opening, familiarising himself with the darkness — finding himself close to the front as they take the
bunker staircase three steps at a time, reaching a small alcove and two doors beyond it. A single guard waits for them, getting a round or two away before his chest is torn apart by concentrated fire.

Two men swing a ram and the door smashes open. CS gas grenades arc into the space beyond. People scream. Pandemonium.

He enters the room, seeking targets, hearing the man ahead of him fire twice in quick succession. Someone goes down. PJ is no longer nervous, but is instead filled with a feeling of invulnerability, of abnormal strength. Over to the right he sees a militant running, grasping for bodies to use as human shields. Even as he fires, another rifle discharges behind him and the man dies where he stands.

The tear gas is disabling people now, forcing eyes closed, some vomiting and retching. Leaning over, hands covering faces. More than a few crawl on the floor towards the entrance, trying to get below the toxic cloud, anxious to be among the first to leave when and if the doors open.

PJ comes off the dais and turns the corner to see two men struggling on the floor. Almost a second — a long time in this kind of operation — passes before he realises that the man on the ground is Dr Abukar, and Zhyogal pinning him down.

He would have already fired but the Algerian has just wrested something from his adversary's hand. PJ recognises it as the trigger that will detonate the explosives.

‘I have it,' shouts Zhyogal. ‘Die! Feel the wrath of God.' He is on his knees, swaying in religious ecstasy. ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet.'

PJ knows that there is no one else beside him — they have dispersed throughout the room hunting down the militants one
by one. He knows that he has just microseconds to act — to do something. To do nothing and die, or act and die also.

 

Isabella looks up from the floor at Jafar, looming over her with the gun in hand, the barrel on her neck. The explosion has changed everything. Fear fills his eyes at first, and then a strange kind of determination. Lifting her by both hands he crushes her against his chest. She tries to struggle but his grip is like iron.

The Special Forces men are everywhere now, like alien creatures in their gas masks, rifles levelled. Impersonal and strange.

‘Get back!' Jafar cries. ‘You cannot shoot me without killing her also.'

His grip shifts so that the crook of his elbow is underneath her chin. In this position he begins to back away, pulling her with him. At first she lets her legs drag but he frees a hand to slap her face hard, and the shock is enough to force her into moving her feet, supporting her own weight, drawing her deeper into a nightmare. The gas makes her eyes water. Nausea builds in her throat.

‘Let me go,' she croaks.

‘Silence.'

She can tell by the timbre of his voice that he too is affected by the gas, yet somehow is still functioning. It occurs to her that perhaps some people are more resistant than others.

Shadowed by three soldiers, the terrorist backs towards the wall, adroitly using her body to shield him all the way. Reaching the bathroom door he pushes backwards through it, shouting to the men who follow: ‘If you try to enter here I will kill her.'

He closes the door behind him, locking it, shoving her to the ground as he does so, withdrawing his pistol from his belt. ‘It was
you,' he shrieks, ‘who brought this upon us, with your cell phone. Move, across the room.'

These are the men's toilets, and they pass a row of porcelain urinals, half screened from each other, then the cubicles. The air in here is free of the debilitating gas. Her eyes and nose stream less.

The terrorist stops before the window with its view out to the sea. He reverses his handgun and raps at the glass. It makes no impression. Again, harder, he smashes the butt against the glass and nothing happens.

‘In the name of God,' he swears.

Isabella has only to look out the window to see that they are at least twenty metres from the ground. What does he expect to do? Climb down in full view and make a miraculous getaway?

Now he stands back and fires at the glass. The sound is shocking, numbing, in that confined space. Isabella feels tiny shards strike her face, and raises both hands to find her skin slippery with blood. She screams, but again he fires.

When the smoke clears it is obvious that there is no way through. The surface is chipped but not cracked. Isabella gathers herself to try to run while the terrorist stands facing the glass, chest heaving.

Realising her intention, he turns and is on her within a few paces. ‘Bitch,' he cries, and with a grip on the back of her shirt, drags her down to the floor. Her head slams against the tiles and he is climbing onto her, his breath on her face. ‘Damn you.'

His face is filled with a thousand sleepless nights of sexual confusion and desire. The war in his mind between passion and religious law. Isabella senses his need to expunge his own guilt with her blood.

‘Whore!'

Stunned from the knock on her head she cannot move a muscle as he smashes his hand against the side of her face.

‘Prostitute,' he grunts. ‘Western pig.' Hatred fills his eyes and now she is more afraid than she has ever been in her life.

For a moment she stares, her mouth open as if it might let the grief escape rather than build. ‘No. God. No, please …'

Her vision comes back into focus. Summoning reserves from deep in her subconscious she tries to fight. Her brother Peter, long ago, as a fifteen-year-old tough, taught her the rudiments of street fighting, and the tactics come back to her in a rush.

She tilts her head with the suddenness of lightning, forehead butting into the soft flesh and gristle of his nose, breaking it so blood pours from both nostrils. He grunts in pain.

Still off balance he tries to raise himself. Isabella brings up her knee, catching his genitals. He rolls off her, moaning and writhing in pain. She expects him to come for her again with his hands, but instead he kneels, slips a knife from a hidden sheath. She sees his fury as he raises the weapon then brings the blade down; the sting as it enters her chest, brutally hard, rising again, plunging inside, cracking against a rib this time before sliding free.

At that moment Isabella understands that he is not merely killing her, but is killing everything he is afraid of and cannot understand, killing her as a way of killing the things inside him that he cannot control. Killing the gods of the others. The rotten and the good. All those things that nothing this side of death can explain.

The blood floods from her chest, and she scarcely hears the ram on the door, heavy-booted footsteps. Isabella's eyes register three men, alien in their gas masks and fatigues. Muzzle flashes. Gunshots.

Isabella Thompson stares with unseeing eyes as her rescuers fill the room. Soon someone lays a blanket over her body and face. On the tiled floor her blood mingles with that of Jafar Zartosht, a man whose primary battle has always been within his own soul.

 

PJ sees himself from outside, elevated as if through some hidden camera as he makes the decision to fire. There is no other choice. He will die no matter what, but this is the only way of saving hundreds of lives.

Taking careful aim, he shoots Zhyogal in the cheek, seeing the neat round hole appear just below the left eye. The second round catches him in the temple.

At the moment of violent death, human muscles can behave in either of two ways: to grip, or release. After the passage of a bullet through the frontal lobe, a man is not capable of thought — is brain dead at that moment — but still there are tricks the body can play before all functioning and movement ceases.

Dropping his weapon, PJ lunges across the intervening ground, reaching out for the terrorist's hand as it swings through the air — the hand that holds the plunger, seeing the gripping reflex of the fingers, wondering just how far the trigger has to fall before contact is made.

PJ's hand closes around the fingers, dragging them off the trigger. As he recovers his balance he brings his other hand to bear also, hearing the terrorist's dead fingers snap under the force of his grip.

Coming to his knees, breathless with relief, he sees one of the SAS troopers bring up his rifle. A single shot catches Dr Abukar in the back of the head, spinning him around.

A woman's shriek. The tall, regal Somali woman goes to her husband, kneeling over the body, cradling him like a child.

Other men reach PJ. Congratulatory thumps on the back or a gentle touch on the shoulder or arm. Yes, somehow, they have done it. It is over.

‘Felix on the way,' someone says, using the British army nickname for a bomb disposal expert.

More men arrive, and with the explosives in the process of being neutralised, PJ watches the tall woman weep over the body of Dr Ali Khalid Abukar. The love in her dark brown eyes is plain to see.

 

The main door now open, Marika comes in behind the second wave, with the medic and relief teams, who focus on the delegates huddling in their shocked circles, hanging blankets on their shoulders and leading them out in silent, shattered groups.

Sufia is on her knees and it is the end of the world; just one of a thousand small deaths that will make up the whole. When the medics come she stands and lets them cover his body and face. Then, her voice carrying to every corner of the room, she begins to speak. Footage, recorded on cell phone cameras, will later be beamed across the world.

‘Ali Khalid Abukar is dead,' she says, ‘and some of you will call him a terrorist. My husband was seduced by the radical extreme of his religion. But it happened because the leaders of the world have stopped listening. Political posturing has become more important than right. People are starving, people are dying, we are making our planet uninhabitable, and still our leaders are more ready to send men with guns than food. Power is not inherent in one person, just the illusion of it. Power resides in the
will of the people. Please, I beg you, listen to his voice, now lost to us. Listen to the voice of a gentle man called to extremism and violence.'

There is some murmuring, and the room might have erupted but for one man who has not yet left, having regained his place at the front of the room, staring out at the exodus of delegates as if imagining what might have been. Marika watches him stand, and the voices that follow Sufia's outburst fall silent. The Secretary General of the United Nations has the face of a man who has stared over the precipice into another Dark Age, into something no sane individual can contemplate.

His voice carries across the room: ‘Terrible things have happened here. Perhaps the world will never be the same; perhaps we have been made to see things we have not seen until now. We cannot let this chance pass by. Time is running out for all of us.'

The room becomes still. Even medics sliding bodies into black, zippered bags stop to listen.

‘The planet earth is a most beautiful place. Unique in all the universe. We have the intelligence and means to be wise caretakers. Instead we have indulged in an orgy of want, of waste, and destruction. We are faced with decisions that cannot wait. In spite of what has happened, the conference will reconvene in the morning, and hard decisions
will
be made.
Must
be made before it is too late. Too late for all of us.'

The clapping starts from a group of delegates, grey army blankets wrapped around their shoulders, being shepherded from the room. A new feeling permeates the room.

Yes, there is much to be done. It is time for the hands of the world to join.

The sun is just nudging the horizon when Marika climbs the last ridge, rewarded with a glade coloured with rock-cress and protea flowers. Beyond is a sweeping mountain panorama, surmounted by the peaks of Batian and Nelion and deep, mist-filled valleys between, cut through by the Liki River. One whole side of the sky is filled with grey and black thunderheads stacked high in the firmament. Thunder rumbles constantly. Lightning flickers and flashes across the sky.

Knowing that she should be finding a campsite, pitching her tent and gathering sticks for a fire, she instead sits down on a shelf of syenite rock and watches the view. The immensity and grandeur of it all. The feeling of wonder is strong within her. Of privilege to be who she is, where she is.

After four weeks at home, healing the aches and pains, she couldn't resist the urge to travel again. This time to the mountain trails of Kenya; not ready to return to Somalia, yet wanting to be close.

The Rabi al-Salah conference, reconvening the day after the terrorists were killed, has been hailed as a breakthrough. The people of the West face inconvenience and perhaps a level of
want many have never before experienced, but there is a chance that the tide of change can be checked, if not stopped. The stockpiles of the West will be opened to feed the world. Carbon emissions slashed.

Marika feels part of something new — that her role in this new world has not yet ended. Perhaps just beginning.

 

One thousand kilometres away, Saif al-Din squats beside a group of men. All carry assault rifles of various makes and models. None smile. They have just finished praying together. They remember those who have fallen. They talk of death and life, of purpose and mission. These eight men from three continents are the remaining members of al-Jama'a al-Ashara, the council of the Almohad, united with a common purpose.

‘This is a setback,' Saif tells them, ‘not an ending. We must deal more harshly with the kufr. Zhyogal was weak: he should have destroyed the head of the snake when he had the chance. We will not make that mistake again.'

He looks down at the fresh, livid scars on his lower legs, where shrapnel tore through to the bone, remembering his terror as he swam four miles to an island, bleeding from limbs, body and head, making contact there with Sana'a, via satellite telephone. There is another scar on his temple, yet no doctor has yet cut for the sliver of steel inside.

Saif al-Din is certain now that God spared him for a reason. There is no doubt in his mind that he has a part yet to play in bringing glory to Him.

 

Eyes closed, Marika hears the first heavy rain drops, thinking of the mob at the gates of Dalmar Asad's compound. A scene that will be repeated across the world. The clamour of the people of this earth, yet to be heard in full voice. Freedom. Dignity. An environment free of pollutants and danger. Eight billion voices. Marika remembers the acacia hut. She remembers what it is like to cry.

The sun dips below the mountains, the moon becoming defined with the passing of a greater light. She stands, brushes off her khaki shorts, then slips her pack over her shoulders, adjusts the straps so the weight is distributed evenly and turns away.

Her feet leave prints in the dust behind her, only to be washed away by the coming storm.