Osama the Gun Page 12

  There were no graffiti-bombs in them.

  Instead there were metal spheres about the size of large oranges painted dull green, red, yellow, and blue, with the familiar timers attached. I immediately understood what they were from my days in the Caliphate spy school, if not why they had been sent.

  “Grenades!” I exclaimed helplessly.

  Color-coded grenades. Not army ordnance but Military Intelligence issue that had never been used in combat and therefore most difficult to trace back to the Caliphate. The green ones were explosives. The red ones were incendiaries. The yellow ones held a vapor that induced vomiting. The blue ones released tear-gas.

  No one spoke as we quickly counted the contents of one carton. Fifty. Thirty cartons. One thousand five hundred grenades.

  Kasim-Pierre grinned triumphantly. “The Caliphate has spoken, Osama the Gun. Clearly and far more loudly than we could have hoped.”

  “Saying what…?” I muttered lamely.

  Kasim-Pierre picked a green grenade out of a carton and tossed it up and down one-handed like a small boy with a ball. “Inviting us to use them, what else?” he said. “Ordering us to use them.”

  “We are not ordered around by the Caliphate!” protested Tarik.

  “Maybe not,” said Kasim-Pierre, “but this is an order we will be happy to obey, will we not?”

  “Will we…?” I stammered, utterly at a loss.

  “They didn’t tell you about this, did they?” Kasim-Pierre said. “You were just expecting more of the same. Hoping for more of the same, isn’t that it, Osama the Graffiti Bomb?”

  There was uneasy laughter at my expense.

  “No order has been given, no message has been sent,” I insisted.

  Kasim-Pierre climbed atop an unopened carton the better to address the entire room.

  “This is the order!” he roared, holding his grenade aloft. “These are the message!” he shouted, gesturing at the piles of cartons. “Use them! Start the Jihad…with a great big bang! With a thousand of them! And when the Frogs respond with their soldiers and tanks and gunships, the Caliphate will show them where the real power lies! The power of the oil without which their army and their helicopters and this whole fucking country will grind to a halt until we offer them our terms. The victor’s terms! The Caliphate is with us, jihadis! That is the message! These weapons are their pledge of honor as surely as…”

  He paused, he looked down at me challengingly. “As surely as the oath of Osama the Gun sworn upon the Holy Koran.”

  What could I say to refute Kasim-Pierre’s words since they rang true in my own mind? Detonating all these grenades would enrage and terrify the French, and surely the Caliphate knew this, and just as surely that must therefore be their intent. Surely they knew that the resulting repression against the French Arabs would be dire, therefore this had to be what those who commanded me desired. And the only reason I could see for the Caliphate provoking such a catastrophe was as an excuse for using the oil weapon.

  Why the Caliphate would want to blackmail the French with an oil boycott on behalf of the beurs I could not fathom. Provoke such a grave international crisis out of solidarity with its French Muslim brothers at such a cost? Even if I could credit the Caliphate Council with such selfless idealism they could have shut off the oil at any time without resorting to such a cruel provocation.

  And cruel it would be, there was no escaping that. The gas grenades might only create mass discomfort, the incendiaries might only burn property, but the explosives would kill scores, if not hundreds. After which, the iron hand of the French government would fall upon millions of innocent Muslims without mercy.

  Fiery zeal glowed in the eyes of the men looking questioningly and threateningly at me, but in the set of the rest of their faces, in the language of their bodies, I could read a reluctance that had little to do with personal fear. They might be jihadis who would have willingly sacrificed their lives for the cause, but they were also human beings, for whom slaughtering the innocent and submitting their Muslim brothers and sisters to a long dark night in the service of the same cause was quite another matter.

  And I? I was the representative of the very Caliphate which had sent these arms. It was my inescapable decision to give the order. Or was it? A war was going to begin. If I refused to start it, Kasim-Pierre would.

  As Tarik had said, “He who will not lead where his followers demand, ends up walking alone.”

  All I could do was try to minimize the casualties.

  “Take a hundred and fifty grenades apiece and distribute them as widely as possible, by tomorrow no single person should have more than a half dozen of them. The incendiary grenades will be planted in the groves and shrubbery of the major parks, and the smaller parks as well, where they will be well hidden and unlikely to be discovered,” I said, assuming the flat cold voice of tactical command. “The gas grenades in the Metro, tossed from the platforms into the tunnels or out the windows of the cars, where they will become just more debris in the darkness. The explosives…”

  I paused, uncertain as to what to do with the explosive grenades, desperately wanting to create maximum impact with minimum loss of life.

  “The department stores,” someone said, “easy enough to hide them in there.…”

  “The trains—”

  “—too conspicuous—”

  “Up the flics’ assholes!”

  “Quiet!” I shouted before I lost all control. “Some of them…in the toilets of tourist boats…or in the holds to sink them slowly if it can be managed…”

  “Bring down the Eiffel Tower!”

  “Blow up the Arc de Triomphe!”

  “These grenades are not powerful enough to do things like that,” I told them. “Try to plant some of them as near as possible to the roof of the Crystal Palace to shatter the glass…try for the smaller bridges…the greenhouses in the Jardin du Plantes…take your share, distribute them, and tell everyone to use their imagination.…”

  “And the timers…?”

  I found myself in a zone I had never quite been in before; thinking and speaking now like a Pentagon computer, like a general. I found it quite liberating, and yes exhilarating. I was Osama the Gun giving orders to my troops, and it felt natural, it felt right, and may Allah forgive me, I enjoyed it.

  “Three days to plant the grenades. Then this time they go off all at once for maximum impact.”

  “Just before sunset!” cried Kasim-Pierre. He had climbed down from his carton and was grinning at me, my brother in arms again, and I his acknowledged leader. “Call it six forty-five, to hit the news channels in their prime time. And the dramatic lighting will be perfect!”

  We all laughed together at that, and together we were. We were Holy Warriors of Islam.

  “Allahu Akbar!” someone shouted.

  “Allahu Akbar!” we all replied.

  We were the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun.

  And we were going to war in earnest.

  CHAPTER 16

  At six-thirty on the appointed day, I moved my living room television set beside the window overlooking Paris from on high. No one who knew what was about to happen would be out on the streets now, and no doubt my jihadis were all huddled before their TVs down in the lowland Green Zones and banlieus. But from the vantage of my living room halfway up the height of Montmarte, I had a magnificent view of most of the city, as the lights of Paris began to come on, as the blue of a lightly clouded sky deepened towards purpling darkness, as the setting sun passing behind a scattered cloud deck painted it darkening gold pierced with rays of orange fire. Streams of red tail-lights winked on and off like twinkling stars on the streets and boulevards.

  At six-forty-five, I barely heard a rapid series of popping sounds like distant strings of Chinese firecrackers. Pin-points of flame erupted all over the enchanting vista spread out before me like the o
pening act of a celebratory city-wide firework display. Puffs of yellow and white smoke expanding into low ground mists like scattered patches of fog. Then widening ragged balls of flame in the foliage of the parklands as trees and shrubbery caught fire, spreading out and joining into ponds and lakes of seething red lava, lighting up the city as if by scores of braziers beneath a great cookfire grating.

  May Allah forgive me, it all rendered the City of Light that much more lovely.

  When I finally tore myself away from this soul-stirring spectacle to watch the television coverage, it was quite another matter. The ticket kiosk at the foot of the northeast pillar of the Eiffel Tower had been blown to pieces and there were bloody bodies on the ground. People streamed from the Concorde Metro station through yellow and white mist, rubbing their eyes, vomiting, smashing into each other. The twin lines of trees along the central esplanade of the Jardin du Plantes formed an aisle of fire. Tourists attempting to swim away from a sinking glass-enclosed boat were being swept away by the current. The inside of the Crystal Palace was littered with broken glass. The Pont des Artists, a wooden footbridge over the Seine, had been blown in half and there were corpses floating in the river. Bloodied people ran down the Champs Élysée where glass display windows had been shattered amidst more blinded and vomiting commuters fleeing the Metro exits through clouds of gas. The garden behind Notre Dame was an inferno. The flower market was burning.

  The commentators were in a panicked frenzy, spreading wild rumors. The Pantheon was on fire. The Élysée Palace was aflame and the President had fled by helicopter. Two of the four glass towers of the National Library had had most of their windows blown out by explosives and the national cultural heritage was ashes. Animals in the zoos at Versailles and the Jardin du Plantes had burned to death. Firehouses had been destroyed. Hundreds had died in a major film theater.

  There was no television footage of any of these things, and as the evening wore down into night, the coverage of the catastrophe, if not the chaos itself, pulled itself together and become more calmly professional.

  There was a massive fire in the Tuileries Gardens, not yet under control, but the firefighters were putting out the ones in the Jardin du Plantes, the Luxembourg Gardens, and most of the less dramatic ones, though the garden behind Notre Dame was now a smoking ruin. Six tourist boats had been sunk, three others damaged but still afloat. Some hundred minor buildings had suffered damage. Four Metro trains had been destroyed. The Port Royal and Maubert-Mutualite stations were no longer useable. There had been at least three hundred traffic accidents reported. The Metro was closed until further notice. A division of army troops was on the way to the city, Mirage fighters were circling it, and a fleet of military helicopters had been deployed.

  Toward midnight they began counting the casualties over footage of ambulances, hospital emergency wards, makeshift field hospitals, bodies on gurneys and in the streets.

  One hundred and sixty three deaths had thus far been confirmed, with no doubt more to come, another ninety-two victims of the terrorists in critical condition, some hundreds more less seriously wounded, but it would be days before final figures could be confirmed.

  The action had been a tactical success but a human disaster.

  As I watched the former from the shameful remove of my living room window while listening numbly to the latter unfolding minute by minute, hour by hour, I chastised myself for my stupidity. A hundred men had left the storeroom with a hundred and fifty assorted grenades each and my orders had been to distribute them as widely as possible. Who could know whose hands would ultimately plant the grenades, what sorts of hands, what ideas of their own they might have?

  I should have known this would happen! Or had a part of me known all along that it would happen? Had the mind of Osama the Gun coldly accepted it as “collateral damage” in the manner of a ruthless general and hid the calculation from the soul of Osama the man? Or was this even worse sophistry?

  I tried to pray to Allah as the causality count continued to mount but I felt myself too unclean to be worthy of His ear. I abluted myself in the bathroom but it did no good. Earlier, I might have drunk myself into a stuporous sleep, but now such an escape was unthinkable.

  And so I sat there on the floor before the television set, holding my bleary eyes open by act of penitential will until long after midnight, drifting in and out of consciousness like a man who has smoked far too much kif, or a nodding heroin addict.

  The last thing I remembered seeing and hearing was the ashen visage of the President of France announcing the imposition of martial law. Then only welcome nothingness.

  CHAPTER 17

  I was awoken by the insistent ringing of the telephone, lying in a stiff heap in front of the television set which was still on and showing some police official preparing to address a news conference. It was near noon or even beyond, judging by the cruel sunlight assaulting my bleary vision.

  I half-crawled, half stumbled to the phone. It was Ali.

  “You’re still here?” he shouted. “Get the hell out of Paris! Get out of France! Withdraw all the cash you can from the wall before they can close your account in Switzerland! Do it now! Why haven’t you done it already?”

  The only answer I could muster was a dazed grunt.

  “Don’t you know what’s happened?” Ali screamed at me.

  I steadied myself on my feet and looked out the window. Revealed in the harsh light of day, patches of the city spread out before me were blackened, and tendrils of black smoke were wafting into the air where fires were still smoldering. I could see several jet fighters circling over the city and swarms of helicopters.

  “Of course I know what’s happened,” I told him as my head began to clear.

  “If you did, you wouldn’t still be here,” Ali told me. “Some thugs of yours tried to rob a bank with explosives and tear gas grenades in the chaos this morning, and the flics caught them, and they’re singing like canaries with cattle-prods up their rectums, and they’re singing about you!”

  “What?”

  I turned to the television set.

  “—caught the perpetrators and they have…been persuaded to be cooperative,” the police official was saying.

  I turned to another channel, and there was Saddam, red-eyed, bruised around the cheekbones and with a split lip, as if the police had wanted to show the severity of his interrogation.

  “—by an agent of the Caliphate,” he was muttering as if a pistol were being held to his back off-camera. “The weapons were supplied by a Caliphate agent who calls himself Osama the Gun—”

  I turned back to the police news conference.

  “—no, he was not identified, and we have no photograph—”

  Another channel. “A spokesperson for the Caliphate has vigorously denied any involvement.”

  Yet another, and there was a black-bearded man in an Arabic headdress whom I recognized as the Caliphate Ambassador.

  “In the name of the Caliphate I absolutely deny these outrageous lies, and our attorneys are going to sue these unspeakable thieves for slander. The Caliphate played no part in this atrocious assault on your capital. We have supplied no weapons to terrorist groups. We have certainly issued no orders to use them. We have no knowledge of this so-called Osama the Gun, and we are ready to cooperate fully with the French police and authorities in apprehending this murderous criminal if our assistance can be at all helpful. We are dispatching units of the Red Crescent to assist in relief and rescue operations, and will supply military assistance if called upon to—”

  I turned the television set off. “What happened?” I moaned at Ali.

  “You are asking me what happened?”

  “Well…well what am I supposed to do…?” I wailed at Ali.

  “I told you, suck all the cash you can out of your Swiss bank account, get out of Paris, and get out of France. Disappear right now. Stay within th
e European Union to avoid border checks, but don’t use airplanes where security checks are already in place, take trains where there won’t be any before the army troops can get here and be fully deployed, which should take at least ten hours.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Don’t ask me, and don’t tell me, I have a great need not to know, the French will surely round up all Caliphate expatriates, myself included, and I warn you I won’t even try to stand up to torture. The French want you alive and talking. The Caliphate must surely want you silently dead.”

  He paused, and then spoke in a quavering near-whisper. “I shouldn’t tell you this, my young friend, and you must swear never to reveal it before I do if the French do catch you.”

  “In the name of Allah…” I muttered numbly.

  “The Caliphate cannot risk your contradicting their lies. I would imagine they’re trying to get professional assassins to Paris even as we speak, if they’re not here already. If they can’t, they’re going to order me to permanently silence Osama the Gun, and, well…”

  “You’d…you’d kill me, Ali…?”

  A long silence.

  “The truth is I don’t know…if it was my life or yours…” Ali admitted wanly. In his next pause, I could sense a final Gallic shrug. “Neither of us wants to be put in a position to find out, now do we?”

  And he hung up.

  I did not delay to change clothes or even to shave, I stuffed a single suitcase with random clothing and dashed out the door without thought. Only while I was waiting for the elevator did I realize I had left the mini-Uzi in the apartment, which was rented in the name on my temporary residence permit. I had to start thinking. Thinking like a fugitive. Osama the Gun had to disappear without a trace.

  I dashed back into the apartment and retrieved the weapon. I washed it in the shower and rubbed it vigorously with a towel to remove fingerprints and DNA traces. I descended to the street and tossed it over the wall and down into the nearby cemetery. I withdrew the limit of 3000 euros from the nearby cash machine and took a taxi to the Gare du Nord.