The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (20 page)

“Stay sharp kiddo,” father Marcellus advises Augustine as he has all his life.

“You too daddy-o,” Augustine replies as he has since he was thirteen.

Augustine puts Elsa down. The men hug and shake hands. Marcellus climbs aboard the RV.

“Take care of your momma for me,” Augustine tells his son Emil. He bends to kiss his boy.

“Aye, aye,” The boy says with a salute and then turns to let his grandfather help him climb the steps into the RV.

Augustine says goodbye to Anya’s aunt and uncle next. He takes his youngest daughter from them and hugs and kisses her while they climb aboard. He then hands Emma back to them.

Augustine picks Elsa up again and kisses her.

“I’ll see you in the morning little lady.”

“O.K. daddy,” Elsa says.

Father and daughter hug and kiss again.

Husband and wife are left on the street. Augustine closes the distance between them and lifts the burka’s hood off his wife’s head. He smiles into her large, green eyes.

“The next time we see each other, we’ll burn this thing together,” Augustine says.

“It’s a date, mate,” Anya answers.

They kiss again.

They pull apart when they hear a car round the corner. It is a Dearborn City Police Department squad car. Even from the distance of a half-block, Augustine can make out Doug Ditka behind the wheel. His large head is bopping to music. The car pulls to a stop and the driver-side window retracts into the door.
‘Rocking in a Winter Wonderland’
spills out the car.

‘Later on, we’ll conspire,

While we dream by the fire…’

“Hey, you two,” Ditka says, sticking his head out the window. “We have laws now against that sort of thing.”

“Not for long we don’t,” says Anya.

“The sooner you get your hands off my partner, the sooner we can do something about it, little lady,” says Ditka, stepping out of the squad car.

Doug Ditka is taller and broader than Augustine. He is six-foot-one with large, trunk-like limbs and a paunch that spills over his gun belt. Doug is dark eyed and dark haired. He is a two hundred and seventy pound bear of a man and the Koenig’s childhood friend. He ambles over to the couple and picks them up, one in each arm. He kisses Anya and then Augustine before letting them back down.

“Merry Christmas!” Ditka says. “Now we’re proper co-conspirators.”

“And a Merry Christmas to you too, DD,” Anya says.

“It will be indeed,” Ditka grins. “If I can get you two separated long enough. Goodness, gracious! You’d think you two were just married. My wife, she doesn’t hold me like that no more and we’re married one year less than y’all.”

“That’s because she can’t get her arms around you,” Anya says.

“That’s it,” Doug says. “I’m taking Auggie away before your headstrong, womanly ways can do anymore damage to this most delicate of men.”

“Fine,” Anya relents. “Take him. He’s all yours.”

She kisses her husband quickly and nudges him towards the squad car.

“Come on, partner,” Ditka says. “We got us some breaking and entry to do.”

Augustine watches his wife board the RV and then catches his father’s reflection in the large, driver’s side mirror. He gives him the thumbs up and his father returns the gesture. The RV pulls out of the driveway. In moments it disappears around the corner. He says a quick and silent prayer for their pro
tection on the road. They are headed to celebrate midnight Mass in Cleveland. He will meet up with them there. Then they’re off to Florida. The Koenig family will not be returning to Dearborn for some months.

Augustine turns and gets in the ‘borrowed’ squad car with Ditka. Doug uses the driveway to make a three point turn and they ride off in the other direction. Koenig is quiet on the passenger side. Part of him is listening to Doug sing along to
‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’
Another part of him is watching his city roll past outside the window, lamenting how hard pressed he is to recognize his own home town. The skyline, the landmarks and the names of streets are all familiar but the feel is foreign. The alien sensation is more palpable than the darkness. He grew up on these streets and never would have imagined that he would feel like he was behind enemy lines while on them. And yet Augustine Koenig does feel precisely that. His eyes might as well still be scouring the skylines of Fallujah, Baghdad and Mosul for snipers.

Dearborn had a sizable Muslim population for as long as Augustine could remember and they were never a problem. The Muslims were just one more group that contributed to the city’s ethnic diversity. They were even assimilating to American life on par with other groups. Doug, Anya and he had mixed with them while growing up. There was a pair of Egyptian brothers that Doug and he shot hoops with almost every weekend. The Alamoudi brothers were part of their childhood crew. They played on their flag football team. They smoked their first cigarettes together. They drank together behind their parents back, went to the same lakeside concerts and traded curse words in Arabic and Russian and German. Despite their religious differences, they never hurled anything at each other than the occasional snowball. Mosque on Fridays and Church on Sundays was the only difference in their young lives an outside observer might have noted.

The younger of the two Egyptians, Hatem was still in town. He was a young and well-respected doctor at the local hospital with three kids of his own by Augustine’s last reckoning. Koenig ran into Hatem Alamoudi outside the ER after dropping off a crazed and strung out meth-head who fell against his night stick a few times while trying to resist arrest.

The two men lit up with smiles at recognizing each other after years apart. They talked for several minutes, eventually pulling photos of their children from their wallets. Augustine showed him Elsa and Hatem showed Koenig
pictures of his two sons and daughter. The old friends were admiring each other’s families when Augustine felt Hatem grow suddenly uneasy. It was subtle but he sensed it nonetheless. Koenig traced his friend’s gaze to the source of the discomfort, the approach of a robed figure.

“Good evening, Doctor Alamoudi,” the man in the cinched robe said. Augustine guessed that he was about the same age as Hatem and he, taller than both, dark-haired and sporting a short, spade-shaped beard. “Everything is O.K., I hope.” He added with smile to Koenig.

“Yes,” Hatem said. “Everything is good, very good. Officer Koenig and I were just catching up. We are old friends, Auggie and I. We grew up together.”

“Is that so?” The robed man turned squarely on Koenig, his smile widened.

“Augustine, this is Imam Yusuf Akef, one of our hospital’s administrators. Imam, this is my childhood friend, Augustine Koenig.”

The cop and Imam shook hands.

“I’m so glad to meet a friend of our Doctor Alamoudi,” Yusuf said. “You must be surprised to find that Hatem has grown up to become such a fine doctor.”

“Not at all,” Augustine answered. “He was always the brightest one in our bunch.”

Hatem smiled, a little wanly, thought Koenig.

Yusuf Akef looked down at the photos the men were still holding.

“Your children?”

“Yes,” Hatem answered. “We were showing them off to each other.”

“Yes, yes,” said Yusuf, his eyes still on the small photos. “And who can blame young fathers for such pride. I have five of my own.”

“They’re beautiful, your children,” Hatem said. “I’ve seen them at the Mosque, often.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Akef said, looking up again. “You have beautiful children as well, brother Hatem and so do you officer Koenig. Your daughter is lovely.”

“Thank you.”

“But all children are lovely, are they not?” Yusuf continued. “They are all blessings and gifts from our most benevolent God, Allah. Blessings and gifts, all of them; but, they are hard work too.”

“Yes,” the two childhood friends agreed.

“Particularly daughters,” the Imam says. “They require a little extra attention if they are to grow into the properly pious women that will make their fathers proud. You both have daughters, so you must know all about it.”

Augustine looked at the Imam for a long moment, wondering what he meant. Akef picked up on his confusion and pointed to a spot on the wall a few feet from them. Koenig turned to see three framed posters. Mounted in the center of the trio, between the government’s Food Pyramid and the yearly reminder to vaccinate for the flu season, the middle poster announced that the city’s new law mandated that all girls be circumcised by age twelve. Augustine was glad he had the back of his head to the Imam. It allowed him to stifle the contempt that contorted his face for an instant. Hatem, however saw the look and the struggle to mask it with a poker face before his old friend Augustine turned back to the Imam.

“Oh, that,” Koenig said flatly behind the thinnest of smiles. He wanted nothing more than to split the Imam’s skull open with his nightstick, kick in his teeth and then empty his clip into what remained of the man’s face, but Augustine still held Elsa’s picture in his hand; and, that alone kept him smiling at the man he had just viciously murdered in his heart.

“Good seeing you again, Hatem,” Koenig said, pumping his old friend’s hand in his. “God bless you and yours, brother.”

“Good seeing you too, Auggie,” Hatem responded, the cowed look in his eyes lifting for a brief moment. “God bless you and your family.”

And with that he turned his back on the men and left the hospital without another look at the Imam.

It was a week before he left the force.

In the years since, the atmosphere in Detroit has grown ever more poisoned, the eyes of both Christian and Muslims ever more cowed. The look he sees in his neighbor’s eyes is one Koenig knows too well. It is the haunting look of defeat he thought he’d seen for the last time when he shook the dust of Iraq off his boots and boarded the C-130 for home.

He never thought he would encounter it in the states, but he did. It is everywhere in Dearborn and Detroit and spreading throughout the nation. Fear and despair cast their ever-growing shadows across the land, closing like two hands around America’s throat, strangling the life out of the country he loves.

Not for much longer, Augustine tells himself, not now that the revolution is launched. The Crusade will put an end to things as they are. And it will be sooner rather than later.

They drive past Kowalski’s Sausage Factory. The building is dark and its windows are boarded up. A score or more figures are gathered beneath it, clustered around four fires burning in oil barrels. The flames throw long, macabre shadows of the huddled bodies against the walls and across the factory’s parking lot. Kowalski’s was shut down in 2015 along with Dave’s Sausage, the Dearborn Sausage Company and a number of smaller outfits when the city became sharia-compliant. Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra, the man the Detroit Times called
the Motor City Mullah,
ignored the entreaties of workers at the time and used the newly adopted sharia laws to impose the strictures of Islam’s
halal
code throughout Detroit and all its suburbs. Overnight, the city’s tradition of sausage making was made illegal by the Muslim dietary code. Pork products disappeared from menus and supermarkets. Thousands of sausage factory workers were added to the ranks of the unemployed in an already depressed economy.

Behind the wheel, Ditka stops singing and shakes his head at the sight. His easy smile disappears. The imposition of
halal’s
pork-less dietary code was an unforgivable offense to Doug’s appetite and palate. He mutters something about ragheads under his breath and drives on.

Doug Ditka, like Augustine, was once a cop. Ditka left Detroit’s police force at the same time that Koenig left Dearborn’s, the summer of 2016 when their union capitulated to Detroit’s Sharia City Council. Until then they had suffered silently through the quarterly sensitivity classes required of them as police officers, but when weeklong retreats to teach them to live like a Muslim were mandated, many a cop drew the line. Neither Ditka nor Koenig would allow themselves to be made further part of Sheik Zahra’s sharia makeover of their cities. Quitting the jobs they loved was the only protest they and scores of others had recourse to.

The Motor City Mullah
was unfazed by the defections or the protests that followed. Though unelected, Sheik Zahra ruled his corner of Michigan through city councils he had, over many years, stacked with loyal devotees. Through them, the man Newsweek dubbed
America’s Ayatollah
, went on to use the police and fire departments to confiscate church bells, lest their ringing ‘offend
Muslim sensibilities’ and to remove crosses from church exteriors, ‘lest their sight dredge up painful memories of the bloody crusades.’

The Christian flight began in earnest then. Those who stayed behind were forced to live in what Islam called
dhimmitude
, a second class status that not only barred one from positions of power, but also exacted the
jizya
tax from non-Muslims for the privilege of living in
Dar al-Islam
, the House of Islam. Women were forced to wear burkas in public and the city’s robust night life disappeared when every bar and club was forced to close. In less than a year the Sheik and sharia shut down Motown and the surrounding areas, clear to Ann Arbor.

Ditka turns the squad car onto Oakwood drive. The Sheik’s crowning achievement, the Ihkwan mega-Mosque, comes into view on the horizon. The sprawling Mosque and Salafi Cultural Center complex was built on the public dime over the testing grounds of the now defunct Ford Motor Company. For Augustine Koenig, there is no more apt a symbol of all that is wrong in the country: a mega-mosque built over the bones of an iconic American company destroyed by its own government. They drive around the sprawling complex taking care not to cross paths with the rent-a-cop patrolling the grounds.

When the guard’s patrol car is at the farthest point from the cultural center, Ditka drives up to its front door. Augustine steps out with his PalmPal in hand. He thumbs an icon and a long string of code appears on the screen. It is a program written to override the building’s security system. It was created by a fellow conspirator Augustine was told ‘was a real cybernetic Houdini working for the Pentagon.’ Koenig holds the small computer close to the keyboard panel on the door and taps the ‘Send’ command. The red light on the panel stops blinking, the green light comes on and the frosted glass door slides open. With the satellites under control of the Crusaders, there is no fear of the security company being alerted to the unauthorized entry.