Two
The Asp somersaulted down the canyon’s steep, boulder-studded slope as he realized what had happened.
The younger of the two fighters, who had guided the Asp across the final kilometers to the Sheik’s refuge, had been a traitor. A new recruit, he had rebuilt ranks decimated by the bloodbath that followed the Great Blow’s failure, but had therefore been sloppily vetted. The traitor had revealed himself by his too-coincident absence, as the drone’s missile approached. The traitor had doubtless managed to inform his true masters, whether Paki, American, or British, that the Sheik’s encampment awaited the arrival of a “high value” target.
This, in turn, told the Asp that the Sheik’s headquarters had been surveilled by the Americans’ malignant eyes in the sky for months. The Sheik, now a shadow of the threat he had been, had been allowed to remain. As bait, that would eventually draw in fighters like the Asp. All of whom had dispersed after the Great Blow failed, in order to survive the Great Satan’s retribution.
As the Asp tumbled, he threw up an arm, shielding his head. His forearm struck a boulder so sharply that he heard bone snap.
After seconds that seemed to last a lifetime, he came to rest on the V-shaped canyon’s narrow floor. He lay, conscious and on his back, shocked by centimeters-deep frigid water that coursed around him. In winter the torrent that had, over centuries, carved the canyon was just a trickle. It remained unfrozen only because it flowed so swiftly.
A hundred meters above him, the explosion’s smoke drifted. Aglow with orange flecks of still-burning debris, it likely contained bits of the Sheik, himself.
No. The Sheik had not been vaporized. He had been alongside the Asp, meters from the house, in the instants before the missile struck. The force of the blast had undoubtedly killed him. But it had also left a body, which the drone would be able to identify.
The Asp’s flight reflex had placed him in the sheltered lee of the canyon’s downslope. And saved his life.
The Asp thought of the Sheik’s broken body, sprawled somewhere on this mountainside. And he realized that he remained in danger. Even as the smoke dissipated, the invisible drone circled above, a mindless, unrelenting vulture. Its distant masters would momentarily re-task it to assess the strike’s results. They would count and identify bodies, and determine whether usable informational materials might be salvaged from the debris.
More importantly, they would task the drone to locate survivors, then fire again.
Ten meters from him, the stream in its meandering had undercut rock and left behind a meter-wide ledge perhaps three meters long that overhung the water.
He tried to move and the pain in his broken forearm struck him like lightning. His left ankle shrieked, more likely twisted and sprained than fractured, but he could not stand, much less run.
The flecks of glowing debris burned out into ash. They drifted down, and sizzled against his bloody cheeks like hot gray snow. He had just seconds.
Teeth gritted, he rolled onto his belly, then dragged himself to the ledge. His damaged arm and leg were useless baggage. He realized that the opening beneath the rock was too narrow to fit under while wearing the knapsack, which remained on his back. He wriggled out of it, then wedged himself, face up and fully concealed, beneath the ledge. Then he dragged the pack in behind him.
The space between his nose’s tip and the ledge’s undersurface was perhaps a handspan. It was as though he was already sealed in his coffin.
It would not have been enough to play dead in the stream. So long as he lived, his body heat would silhouette him on overhead thermal imagery. He would be easily distinguished from a corpse, which would quickly cool to its surroundings’ temperature.
Fleeing, and so becoming a moving target, meant certain death. But weakened by injuries, freezing as the water coursed around him and sucked away his body heat, staying put was scarcely better.
However, as the Sheik had said, his cause was just. God was with him. God had spared him from the blast, and now from the drone’s further predation.
The fog of shock, and the numbing anesthesia of the freezing water, mercifully dulled his pain. As consciousness faded he realized that if God chose to bring rain, or snow, and flood this stream, he would drown, trapped beneath this ledge.
Had God spared him from the blast to serve a greater purpose? Or merely to grant him a peaceful death? Soon enough the Asp would learn which.
He tugged the knapsack close against his torso for insulation, then closed his eyes.
* * *
Seven weeks after the Asp had evaded the Paki damage assessment party, sent overland for on-ground evaluation of the drone strike, his ankle merely throbbed.
The twelve-hundred-kilometer journey from Pakistan’s former Tribal Areas to the port of Karachi could be covered by automobile in one or two long days. But security, not speed, was his priority. And he required intervals of rest to heal. He relied more upon local buses than upon the sometimes policed trains. Even though True Islam still had many friends in Pakistan, not least among those who enforced its laws.
A friendly orthopedist, who treated the infection created when the Asp had amputated his own, frostbitten, left small toe, had dismissed the broken arm as a closed fracture of the ulnar shaft. It was, he had said, an injury familiar to Paki physicians. It occurred when common thieves, and also demonstrators, shielded their faces from nightsticks swung by the police. The orthopedist had also amputated another frostbitten toe from the Asp’s left foot.
Today the healed “night-stick fracture” remained fragile enough that the Asp towed his rolling suitcase using his uninjured arm. A slight limp, caused by his diminished left foot, remained for the moment. It would, God willing, heal soon enough.
This part of Karachi’s East Wharf, along Chinna Creek, smelled of rot and creosote in the humid sea air. But its pavement made for easier walking than the rocky mountain trails he had sometimes resorted to during his journey.
Still, he paused fifty meters from the freighter’s gangway, both winded and to assess the unexpected next obstacle to his progress.
The Quran counseled patience and frugality’s virtues. But the primary reason he had avoided air travel was to avoid the heightened security that accompanied it.
He had already purchased two serviceable false passports, from a forger in Karachi. Based on the first of these, and on one-way passage paid in full, and in cash, he had been issued a passenger’s port photo ID. The tag allowed him to pass onto this wharf. His pass would allow him to do the same at intermediate ports of call, if he chose.
The bereted public servant who loitered at the gangway’s base was a cargo inspector. He had no reason or jurisdiction to interfere with a passenger, properly documented or not. But he wore a walkie-talkie on his broad belt. The Asp had no desire to contest his authority and invite scrutiny.
As at most ports, vessels that called at Karachi carried, in addition to freight, a handful of passengers. He had booked passage on this break-bulk forty thousand DWT vessel because of its unflattering online photos of its three passenger cabins.
More particularly, he had booked it because those photos probably accounted for the fact that all three cabins remained un-booked, just one day before sailing. His voyage’s purpose was not to make new friends among fellow passengers.
Sailing time was in one hour. The cargo inspector no doubt reasoned that the ship’s sole passenger would be along directly.
The Asp donned plain-glass reading spectacles, extracted his leather-bound copy of the Quran from his case’s front pocket, and approached the gangway with the book open, as though he were reading.
When he reached the gangway, he flashed his photo ID, suspended from the lanyard he wore around his neck.
The cargo inspector stepped between the Asp and the gangway.
The Asp stopped, heart pounding, and looked up at the inspector’s mustachioed frown. “Is there a problem, Inspector?”
The cargo inspector didn’t answer. He simply pointed toward the Asp’s Quran. “That is a beautiful edition. May I admire it more closely?”
The Asp handed it across.
When the inspector returned the book, the rupee notes that had formed his bookmark were gone.
It was a silly dance, but an ordinary one outside the First World. Minor government officials were routinely paid less than living wages. They were expected to make up the difference by extracting gratuities. For doing the things that the law required them to do anyway. More enterprising officials, like this one, extracted a bit extra, for not doing things that were none of their business in the first place.
For the Asp, this exercise’s upshot was reassurance that, during this adventure, forgers’ shortcomings could usually be remediated by folding money.
Suitably compensated, the cargo inspector smiled. “First freighter voyage?”
“Yes.”
“Do you speak Chinese?”
The Asp shook his head.
The inspector jerked a thumb at the rust-streaked black hull that rose behind him. “The captain speaks no Urdu or Pashto. Don’t be alarmed when he demands your passport. It’s normal. He’ll return it to you when you leave the ship in Shanghai.”
“I know.”
When the Asp disembarked in Shanghai, he would destroy this set of identity documents anyway. He would depart Shanghai with new documents better suited to the roles he intended to assume. Commercial hubs like Shanghai hosted expansive communities of competent, reliable providers and modifiers of documents, stolen or forged. Several such providers appeared on the Sheik’s list.
According to what the Asp had read online before booking this cabin, none of this vessel’s crew spoke Urdu or Pashto. Another privacy bonus.
The cargo inspector smiled once more and snapped off a salute as he left. “May God grant you gentle seas, fair winds, and a successful journey.”
* * *
Seas, winds, and unflattering photos aside, the Asp’s cabin was a plain but clean metal box. So many years removed from his upper-class childhood, he now found the accommodation sinfully luxurious.
A single bed, dressed in white Egyptian cotton, would be changed weekly. A rectangular porthole, and en suite bathing facilities, would pamper him as he healed. And he would rebuild his strength in the ship’s “gymnasium,” a space scarcely bigger than a market stall in the Khan-el-Khalili.
He removed his laptop from his wheeled case, then plugged it in to charge at the cabin’s small writing desk. Freighters offered passengers no internet connection, and he would have avoided one’s insecurity anyway.
He faced toward Mecca, removed his prayer rug from his bag, prostrated himself on the cabin floor, and completed the afternoon prayer.
After prayers, the cabin’s deck plates shuddered beneath his feet as the ship’s engines stirred. He sat at the desk, started up the laptop, then scrolled through the reading list of two hundred fifty-six books and videos that he had downloaded.
He needed no book to teach him that Islam’s enemies were the Jew, and the Godless states the Jew manipulated. What he needed to know more about were the Jews’ other enemies. One enemy in particular. Because this quest, upon which he was embarked, depended on the proposition that the enemy of one’s enemy was one’s friend.
The twenty-one-day voyage to Shanghai afforded him the gift of time to understand the past. The past was immutable, but without understanding it he could not confirm which truth confronted him in the present. Nor could he utilize that truth to devise a plan to shape the future in a manner pleasing to God.
He selected an appropriate volume, then studied until aches in his leg and forearm broke his concentration. He pushed his chair back, stretched, and peered out his porthole at the darkness that had fallen.
Facts were necessary. So, too, historians’ opinions. And maps, black-and-white photographs, and jerky, grainy newsreel films, viewed on a laptop’s screen. The Asp’s study of such things, and thereafter his action taken, based upon it all, would, God willing, bring forth God’s great fist.
But the Asp wished that, instead of darkness, he could see back through time to where it had begun. In the decadent tumult of the Weimar Republic.