Osama the Gun

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2016 by Norman Spinrad.

  All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  CHAPTER 1

  Like millions of other Muslim boys in the Caliphate and beyond, I was given the name Osama in honor of both the Sons of Osama and Osama bin Laden who gave it birth, but I will say no more to protect my family, save that I was born into circumstances of ease and deprivation. As a boy, I received a proper Muslim education in one of the best madrasses, but I was deprived of knowledge of the wider world beyond the borders of the Caliphate.

  The Caliphate sought to preserve the righteous purity of the kingdom which Allah had placed in its charge by maintaining ignorant innocence. Satellite television receivers were forbidden, western films were forbidden, western music was forbidden, and when the Sons of Osama seized power in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, re-established the Caliphate, and spread its rule to poorer Muslim lands beyond, guest workers from the lands of the Godless were no longer needed, easily enough replaced by righteous but indigent Pakistanis and Egyptians. What few westerners were allowed inside its borders for necessary purposes were confined to a rigid purdah. Visas to travel outside the Caliphate were made difficult to obtain.

  But forbidden fruit seems all the sweeter.

  In the Golden Age of the first Caliphate, when it was a simple matter of closing land borders and forbidding foreigners from setting foot on sacred soil, such a policy was enforceable, was wise, but in what the ungodly call the “modern globalized era,” such a policy was self-defeating.

  Radios the size of cigarette packages were available in the souks for next to nothing. Western films and music stored on chips the size of a thumbnail fell from the skies like rain. Efforts to maintain perfect firewalls around the censored interior Caliphate Internet were futile. Illegal satellite antenna balloons were far from uncommon and mighty broadcast satellites, far out in geosynchronous orbit blasted out pornography, propaganda, and advertising. The electronic rantings of priests and evangelists and rabbis were easy for the Faithful to ignore but the “entertainment” and “advertising” were created to appeal to the base desires that lurk within even the most righteous Muslim by powerful djins of these black arts of seduction.

  And no more so than to innocent adolescent Muslim boys. I knew nothing at the time of the life and ways of the millions of young male Muslim adolescents in the poor lands outside Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, in teeming Cairo and Baghdad and Damascus, and only later did I learn that though far harsher, their boyhoods had been freer than mine.

  Freer to be tempted and seduced, for in the great souks of the crowded cities where the hands of the religious police could hardly be everywhere, the film and music chips were as available as hashish and heroin and alcohol and just as addictive. Particularly the pornography. Images of seductively nubile women, not merely whose faces went unveiled, but whose breasts and even pudenda were exposed. Music that sang openly of the pleasures of the most perverse and obscene sexual acts. Advertisements for western flesh-pots, aphrodisiacs, penile enhancements, masturbatory robots. All appealing to boys who burned with sexual frustration.

  Not that boys in the Caliphate did not.

  Islam teaches that sexual passions must be controlled by the will of righteousness and their fulfillment postponed until marriage, which is perhaps why Allah, in his beneficence and mercy, allows the Muslim male the privilege of four wives to look forward to.

  For those who can afford them. But for every man who enjoys four wives, there must be three who go without any. For them, there is only the promise of orgasmic bliss in paradise after a virtuous death. Which the films and music of the West is readily available in the here and the now, if hardly in the arms of seventy-two virgins.

  Yes adolescents in the poor provinces of the Caliphate were freer than I in their boyhoods. Freer to be washed over by temptation. Freer to suffer even more intense frustration. But even in the Caliphate, the forbidden fruit was more circumspectly available to send the poisons of adolescent passion surging through our arteries to engorge our frustrated desires.

  Film and music chips would pass secretly from hand to hand to be viewed and heard mostly in solitude, but from time to time small groups of us would gather to indulge in such “entertainment” collectively and what else might have occurred must be left to the impure imagination.

  Suffice it to say, that like many of my boyhood companions, my secret dream was to taste the forbidden fruits so readily available beyond the closed world of the Caliphate. But unlike most, by the time I was sixteen, I had formulated a plan to allow me to do so. I made myself into the most righteous of the righteous and the most diligent of students in the madrass. Both were necessary to be among the few to be admitted to the foreign service academy, for only the most promising students and unquestionably righteous and loyal Muslims had any chance of being selected.

  Yes, the Caliphate maintained a foreign service of sorts and embassies in Europe and even America. For there must be commerce with the Great Satan America and its vassals, mostly in the form of the export of our petroleum without which their economies could not function, and the import of their surplus food, without which our overpopulated lands would suffer famine, and foreign representatives must be granted exit visas to negotiate and oversee such trade.

  Or so I had believed when I entered the academy. But once enrolled, I soon learned that there was more to it than that. We all studied foreign languages, I English and French, economics, and the art of bargaining. But there was an inner school for which only the most loyal of the loyal were selected.

  To be trained as spies and secret agents.

  I was determined to be one of them, for the western films portrayed the secret agent, particularly the Caliphate agent, as a well-subsidized playboy surrounded by sexually available women, and often constrained to seduce them in the line of duty, while secretly remaining the most loyal Muslim agent of the “evil” Caliphate. A perfect life that uniquely combined pleasure with moral righteousness, enduring the flesh-pots of the west in the service of Islam. Such was the fantasy of the Islamic innocent, insinuated into my boyish soul by the minions of Satan.

  There was an entr
ance test. Only a select few were offered the test and how we were selected was kept secret from us. We were told that we could accept or refuse the test without blame, but not what it would be. Of course curiosity if nothing else, and in my imagination, there was much else, prevented me from refusing when the test was offered to me.

  * * * *

  I was packed into a helicopter and flown to the outskirts of a small town whose name I was not told. I was given the location of a stand in the souk where coffee was sold and a photograph of the merchant. I was told that this man was committing offenses against the Caliphate.

  I was not told what they were, only that the punishment decreed was death, and I was handed a small pistol, and ordered to perform the clandestine execution. The pistol fired darts of ice encapsulating a neurotoxin that would enter the target’s circulatory system and simulate a fatal stroke once the ice melted. I was not told why a public beheading was not in order, nor what would happen to me if I failed to carry out my mission.

  Trembling with anticipation, moral qualms, and dread, I made my way to the modest souk at the center of the town, and found the coffee seller’s stand. It was a plain opened-sided tent with a plank over two splintery gray sawhorses before it holding large brass platters of roasted coffee beans with wooden barrels of more within.

  Behind the counter was an old man with an unkempt gray beard wearing a coarse and threadbare white burnoose. Beside him was a boy too young to be other than his grandchild.

  It was an hour or so before the sundown prayer, the little souk was crowded, this was the only coffee stand in it, and so business was conducted continually if not briskly, as customers gathered round haggling and gossiping while the boy fetched more coffee beans from within from time to time as I stood back hesitantly for quite some time watching.

  Since then, I have killed more men than I can count or even know, yet this first time stands most clearly in my memory even years later. For my first kill was done as a teenaged boy in a crowded souk with my senses sharpened by fear and guilt, as I finally screwed up my courage to push my way into the crowd of customers. I remember the crunch of the pebbly sand under my shoes, the aroma of coffee, the sweat smell of the crowd, the little hairy mole on the old man’s face, the dryness of my mouth as I palmed the pistol.

  I leaned over a platter of coffee beans, sniffing at them like a dubious customer until the boy went into the tent and the old man had turned to haggle with a veiled woman, exposing the side of his neck beneath his left ear, and seizing the moment without thought, I fired.

  There was no sound, or at least none that could be heard over the buzz and clatter of the souk. The old man slapped at his neck as if bitten by an insect without a pause in the conversation, I left, and the deed was done.

  Or was it?

  I was admitted into the spy school, but I was never told whether the old man died, or whether the whole exercise had been nothing more than a harmless show put on to test me. When I was foolish enough to ask, I was told that I had no need to know and my mentors had no need to tell me.

  CHAPTER 2

  I was taught the use and care of weapons, the use of surveillance devices and the use and fabrication of explosives, and given courses in the “popular culture” and ways of the west which were to prove naively useless.

  I was given a cover identity as the “black sheep” of a wealthy family forced to flee the Caliphate for having used an illegal internet connection to electronically abscond with a hefty portion of the family fortune and deposited it in a Swiss bank account, to which I was given credit card access. I was given an exit visa to Lebanon from where I was to enter Israel, secure a tourist visa to France, and once inside, apply for political asylum.

  It was well-known that France had a population of several million Muslims suffering life as a despised underclass futilely yearning for the embrace of the Caliphate, but now I was told that the Caliphate sought to extend that embrace to these Muslim brothers in exile, if not how.

  There were many such well-heeled and idle refugees from the Caliphate in France as my false self, since only apostates from the Caliphate could secure political asylum and only the wealthy need apply. Most of them were what they seemed, but a handful were Caliphate agents, a fragile and problematic network, it was ruefully admitted, for their necessary wealth made it all too easy for them to be corrupted by the sybaritic life in the most hedonistic country of the west to the point where their cover identities became the real thing and their only loyalty was to the Swiss bank accounts provided to them by the government they were betraying.

  My mission, therefore, I was told, was to spy on the spies, sort out the true Islamic patriots from the corrupted parasites, report back, and await further orders.

  When I crossed into Lebanon, I thought that my boyhood fantasy was about to be fulfilled, but I learned that life outside the Caliphate was neither as depicted in smuggled western films nor in our own internal propaganda.

  I checked into a grand hotel in the Muslim quarter of Beirut. To my horror, there was nothing Muslim about it. There was a large bar in the lavish lobby where inebriated Christians and no few Jews mingled and brayed with equally inebriated Muslims. The major restaurant served pork. Not only did unveiled women mingle shamelessly with the men, there was a cabaret where women danced lewdly in what amounted to nothing at all. Explicit perverse pornography of the most vile sort was available on demand on my room’s television. Room service would provide prostitutes.

  The temptations purveyed in the films to which I had shamefully masturbated as a boy here were readily available in the naked flesh. Worse still, my cover story permitted no demonstration of righteous outrage, for I was commissioned to behave like these apostates and infidels, or at least seem to.

  No doubt a western audience would have found my plight comical. Indeed as I was later to learn, the innocent, outraged, but fiercely aroused son of the Caliphate confronting the flesh-pots of Hamburg or Amsterdam or Las Vegas was a stock comic figure in the west.

  But the humor was lost on me. I kept to my room for a week when I wasn’t praying earnestly in the mosque for guidance from Allah, rather than proceeding directly to Israel as instructed. For if this was what transpired in a Muslim country outside the righteous embrace of the Caliphate, what would I confront in a country of Jews?

  But finally I had to screw up my courage to find out. I do not now remember what I had expected, but it was certainly not the attitude I encountered at the Israeli border.

  My Caliphate passport was immediately stamped with a six month tourist visa. “Salaam, enjoy your stay in Israel, just remember this isn’t a work permit,” I was told, “and don’t bother applying for Israeli citizenship, you won’t get it. No offence, but we have more Arab voters here than we need already. Shalom.”

  May Allah forgive me, Israel was more to my liking than Lebanon, or at least Jerusalem was more to my liking than Beirut. I was surprised to see many more Arabs on the street than Jews, and most of those wore identical black suits, hats, and coats, and had long beards like the most devout of Muslims. Vehicles were banned on the Jewish Sabbath and the mosques were thronged for Friday prayers. Pork was nowhere to be had, bars were few and far between, no prostitutes were in easy evidence, and lewd cabarets were nowhere to be seen.

  In hopes of relieving my confusion I entered a little tea garden as might be found anywhere in the Caliphate, and struck up easy conversation with the denizens, most of them Arabs, but a few of them Jews, and learned that the situation was nothing like what we in the Caliphate were led to believe.

  Jerusalem, I learned, was the capital of both Israel and Palestine. Far from yearning to join the Caliphate and being prevented from doing so by the Jews, Palestine was under the Israeli nuclear umbrella and glad of it.

  “Join the Caliphate?” a Palestinian scoffed scornfully. “Fight for our own country for fifty years and finally get it, only to give up
our independence and a cozy economic relationship with Israel?”

  “Jerusalem’s an Arab city these days, except for the yubba-bubbas, and tourists like me,” a Jew told me. “For the rest of us, it’s a kind of Jewish Disneyworld where they roll up the streets on Friday night and there’s no weekend. You want night life, go to Tel Aviv, there’s a town that hips and hops!”

  Having no desire to experience the Jewish version of Beirut, I went to the French embassy the next morning.

  “Ah oui, you want a tourist visa, do you?” the functionary said archly. “We don’t get many tourists from the Caliphate, and the ones we do get all apply for political asylum,” he told me, while stamping a 90 day visa in my passport.

  “A piece of advice, mon ami. If a flic catches you with an expired tourist visa on a Caliphate passport, you’re out of France on the next TGV, no appeal process. You apply for political asylum, you’ll be asked to produce proof that you won’t be a burden on the state. If you can’t, you’ll be out after a week spent in a detention camp. If you can, you won’t get political asylum either, but there’s an application procedure that will take a very long time to process, that can take forever if you pay a special non-expediting fee from time to time, if you understand my meaning, and until there’s a final decision, no carte de travail and no national health coverage either, but as long as you pay French taxes on any income, including foreign interest and dividends, you’re a de facto French resident.”

  CHAPTER 3

  And so I entered France, a country so corrupt that a gate-keeping functionary would volunteer advice on how to ooze around the laws of his own government, for which he would have been beheaded were he a Caliphate official and found out, and yet so genially welcoming that he did so as one human to another without even hinting at a demand for baksheesh.

  Was this evil or was this good? I had been taught that “democracy,” being rule by the will of the ignorant mob, was an affront to the prescription for virtuous governance by the Ulema as prescribed by Allah, blessed be His Name, but even before landing at Charles De Gaulle Airport, I had begun to learn that this wicked infidel ideology produced people in whom good and evil mingled in a manner difficult for a righteous Muslim to truly fathom.