Sword of Allah

Flores, Indonesia

Hendra danced up and down, whooping and yelling. Duat swivelled his head as the drone flew overhead, watching it track down the beach. Unbelievable. The plane had completed its pre-programmed flight plan just as Hendra had said it would, a circle that took it more than fifty kilometres out over the sea. Duat patted Hendra on the back as the former air force communications man took control of the plane through the small transmitter. It behaved just as if a pilot sat at the controls, only the pilot in this case would have to be impossibly small as the cockpit was only big enough in size for a piglet.

‘Now we begin trials with Sword of Allah,’ Hendra said.

Duat smiled. Yes, Khalid bin Al-Waleed, the famous general known as the Sword of Allah, who conquered so many lands and peoples in the time of the Prophet, and in His name. ‘That is a good name, Hendra. Kadar Al-Jahani would have approved. We’ll paint “Sword of Allah” on the side of the drone and bless it with prayers and song.’

‘Thank you, Emir,’ said Hendra as he turned to sprint up the beach to collect the aircraft just landed.

Duat allowed himself some degree of satisfaction. Plans had actually progressed far better than he ever would have expected since the death of Kadar. Much of that, Duat readily admitted to himself, was largely because of Kadar’s planning and foresight. The strike against the embassy had achieved many good things — secured their support and swelled their ranks.

A sudden sharp explosion from the encampment made Duat flinch. The screams began as he sprinted up the embankment and into the camp. It had come from the weapons range. Duat rounded the hut where lectures on explosives were given, and pushed through a growing knot of men and women shouting and crying over the remains of three men who’d been harvesting Composition B from claymore mines. Obviously, some of the men had been careless and all three had paid the price with their lives, the mine’s seven hundred small ball bearings macerating them into human mince. The sight annoyed Duat. They could ill afford to lose three lives so pointlessly. One of the dead had also been amongst the most experienced of the explosives handlers, personally trained by Kadar Al-Jahani himself. He would be missed.

Kipchak Khan Janiberg, the Mongol Khan of the Golden Hordes, screamed at the top of his lungs so that his own men cowered in fear behind him. His anger rang in his own ears and his horse shifted about nervously, its hooves scrabbling for purchase in the greasy mud. He again cursed the delays forced on his army by the weather and by the sickness. These delays had allowed news of the Khan’s approaching force to race ahead of the forward companies, bringing stories of the horror set to be unleashed on the people of this Italian outpost. So the peasants, merchants and noblemen alike had time to run for their lives and cringe like frightened dogs behind the city’s forbidding concentric grey walls.

The Khan looked up at those implacable walls and in frustration called aloud to the gods to deliver the city of Caffa on the shores of the Black Sea to his army. For three long years they had surrounded it and yet the city was still denied him. The Khan snatched at the bridle and his white horse wheeled about. One of the men beside him, a general no less, slipped off his mount and landed heavily on the ground, unconscious. Kipchak did not have to wonder long at the reason for the fall, for the characteristic swelling the size and colour of a rotten onion stood out black and shiny from the man’s neck. Frightened by the proximity of the disease, where a man vomited blood and his fingers, toes and penis turned black before death came, the Khan dug his spurs into the horse’s thighs and galloped off towards the camp.

Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim found the general later on his rounds. He was one of many charged with the gathering of the hundreds who died daily, for disposal. The wagon behind him swayed precariously in the mud, overloaded with corpses for the cleansing fires. There were some on the pile who were still alive, but only just, but the Khan’s household had made the decision that, for the good of all, those close to death should be taken to its bosom. Rahim looked down at the general, a great man by all accounts, a leader, a conqueror of foreign lands and people, laid low by the swelling disease, and soon for the fires. The irony of it made him laugh, for he, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim, was a nobody from a poor family with no land and no prospects save for the opportunity provided by war, and yet here he was, strong and alive, a conqueror of death itself. A survivor. He directed his assistants to pick up the general and throw him on the wagon. But the general was a big man with plenty of meat still on his carcase, despite the long campaign, and it took three to lift him. Rahim took him by the shoulders and lifted up his head.

‘Send me to mine enemies,’ the general said breathlessly.

It was a strange thing to say and Rahim asked him what he meant. Of course, the general was delirious and couldn’t understand anything Rahim said to him, but he nevertheless kept repeating, ‘Send me to mine enemies,’ while he rocked and swayed on top of the small mountain of legs and arms and heads loaded on the wagon, as it wound its way through the encampment.

This was a dream Rahim had experienced many times before, and he knew it like an old and familiar movie. Sometimes he played a soldier, once the Khan himself, but mostly he was just an extra in the drama that filled his sleep. And because it was a familiar dream, he was not at all scared by its horror. Indeed, since his system had been introduced to heroin, he found himself capable of manipulating the story in his sleep, just like a movie director. So it was that Rahim allowed the drama to cut to the tent of the Khan.

Rahim approached the guards outside the entrance. He could see the fear in their eyes, for Rahim had become associated with Death, indeed was His emissary. ‘Tell the Khan that I, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim, can deliver Caffa to him.’

The guards looked nervously at each other. They were clearly frightened of him, but equally fearful of disturbing the Khan’s pleasure, the cries of ecstasy and pain rising in volume from the captured women within. But on this long campaign in foreign lands, the guards, themselves soldiers, knew the importance of spies, traitors and stratagems. Yes, the Khan would be angry at the disturbance, but war came before a women’s legs were parted and the guards would lose their lives if they were involved in prolonging the siege one day longer than necessary. Fortunately, while they considered Rahim’s request, a scream mixed with the grunt of male orgasm told the guards that their king’s lust was spent, and they allowed the filthy pedlar of death to pass after searching him thoroughly.

Rahim entered the tent and saw the Khan lying amongst five naked women, all of them smeared with the blood of a sixth woman disembowelled on the floor. Rahim surmised rightly that the dead woman was a virgin, and free of the disease, and so her blood possessed magical protective powers.

‘What!’ demanded the Khan when he saw Rahim enter, blood dripping from his beard.

‘Great Khan. I can deliver Caffa to you.’

Such was Rahim’s ability to manipulate the dream that he moved it forward again to the moment marking the beginning of the end of the siege of Caffa. Rows of trebuchets were assembled in crescents around the city walls, their wheels chocked and raised to provide maximum elevation and, hence, range. Rahim himself had been given the task of loading their pouches with the lethal cargo, fresh human corpses displaying the largest black swellings under their arms and in their groins. And there were many corpses available as the swelling disease had cut a swath through the Mongol army, great piles of them stacked ready and waiting, oozing filth with a stench that made even Rahim gag.

Rahim watched for the Khan’s signal, a nod to the herald with the cow’s horn. A groan from one of the bodies loaded on the sling beside him distracted him and he missed the movement of the Khan’s head, but the clear notes that rang hard against the city walls were unmistakable.

Rahim wondered if this was what the general meant when he said, ‘Give me to mine enemies,’ but it was a good idea. Rahim himself gave the order and the hammers came down on the locating pins, releasing the massive counterweights and leather springs that wound rapidly back to their stops. The heavy trebuchet arms swung through their arcs in unison and, with a mighty crash, the first wave of infected corpses flew high in the air and cleared the walls of the city. The Mongols cheered while the townspeople on the parapet watched perplexed at the tangled human mass that sailed overhead and landed with a distressing splat on the muddy walkways and stonework within the walls.

‘Rahim…Rahim.’ Rahim felt the hand shaking his shoulders and he opened his eyes. ‘You were tossing and turning and calling out. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he said, blinking. Such a rapid journey from the distant past to the present was disorienting. No, it was only a dream, fool. Yet the dream had become so vivid since his cancer had been diagnosed, he often wondered whether he really had been at the Mongol siege of Caffa in 1346, the first recorded instance of the use of biological weapons. He had studied it when the Saudi army appointed him to head up its defensive chemical/biological weapons program. Renamed Feodoysia, he had even visited the city in the Crimea and, frighteningly, parts of the old centre had been familiar to him. The infected corpses, riddled with the bacillus Yersinia pestis, and their clothes harbouring the most likely carrier, the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, had had the desired effect. The plague raced through the town and Caffa was taken. But not before many townspeople had escaped and carried the Black Death to other population centres, bringing about the Great Plague of Europe in which millions perished.

Rahim knew that the notion of punishment for deeds in a previous life was against the teachings of Mohammed, may His name be praised, but he considered it anyway. He wondered whether the vivid dream was an actual moment from a life lived long ago. Perhaps his rapidly advancing cancer was God’s way of evening the score over past misdeeds. And yet here he was again, loading a modern trebuchet with a biological agent to spread death and destruction. Rahim lay quietly on his bed for a time and considered the parallels.

‘Etti,’ he called out. ‘Prepare my medicine.’ Why face the day without it? Rahim told himself.

A short time later and with Etti’s help, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim climbed into the one-piece rubberised suit as the warmth of the medicine spread through his veins, wiping out the pain as effectively as rain extinguishing fire. Only the barest hint of the agony that had been his constant companion remained. He sat patiently while Etti packed away the quarter brick wrapped in its red wax paper, placing it in a strong box. Initially she had disapproved, but then she’d seen the change, the benefits it brought. The drug gave Rahim the strength to lift his limbs off the bed. Under its influence, he no longer seemed a walking cadaver.

Rahim had calculated his consumption of the White Stallion at present dosage levels and determined that he had enough to last a year. However, the dosage was increasing steadily, his body building its tolerance to the alkaloid’s invasion of his nervous system. Rahim had three, or perhaps four, months left to live before the cancer took him to his grave. How much he would need in that final month was anyone’s guess, but Rahim wanted to be sure there was more than enough. The pain was unendurable without the white powder now, and its ferocity would build in his last days, blotting out memory, invading his every cell with its malevolence. The pain would occasionally even spike through the drug’s protective blanket, a foretaste of what was in store for him. Rahim was terrified. The White Stallion would protect him and eventually carry him into the earth’s embrace. He would sit on its wide back, out of reach of the demons that clawed up from the blackness to take him to their breast. Enough. Rahim’s heart raced as his mind grappled momentarily with reality. He had considered killing himself after the news of Kadar Al-Jahani’s death, his one and only link with the Holy Land. But his increasing love of the drug kept him from taking his own life, fortifying him with stamina to go on. Rahim pressed the seal closed on the NBC suit. He had work to do, dosages of another kind to determine.

A knock on the door made him lift his bloodshot eyes. Rahim realised the sound had been increasing in volume for some time. How long had the man been standing in the doorway? ‘Yes, what is it?’ he asked dreamily.

‘Do you have it, doctor?’ asked the man wearing shorts and nothing else. His body, Rahim noted, was covered in crude tattoos, mostly aimless doodles of self-mutilation.

‘Yes, there on the bench.’

The man’s bare feet tracked dirt and sand across the clean, freshly swept floorboards as he made his way to the workbench. He picked up the brick and examined it closely. It was yellow, transparent and heavy, but buried deep within the transparent yellow casing was what appeared to be a white tile. ‘Doctor, you are a miracle man,’ he said as he tossed the brick spinning into the air above and caught it. ‘This is perfect.’

‘There are fifty more curing in moulds. You can have them this afternoon,’ said Rahim.

‘Now we can finish production. Emir will be pleased,’ said the man, spinning the brick again into the air, much to Rahim’s annoyance, as he ran out the door.

Rahim summoned the energy to stand. The effort made his head swim. ‘Help me with this, woman,’ he said. Etti quickly closed and locked the door and turned the air-conditioning to full. She then hurried to Rahim’s side.

‘You should be in bed,’ she said, lifting the hood of the rubber suit over his head.

‘Ah, woman. You are like a scratched record. There will be plenty of time for lying down. An eternity of it.’ Rahim was beginning to warm to his assistant despite himself. Her concern for him was genuine. And when the drug was coursing through his veins, he even had the strength to at least consider filling her with his seed but, unfortunately, that part of his body had long since ceased to function as God intended.

The suit smelled of rubber and bleach, its outer shiny brown skin still slick in parts from the dousing she’d given it the day before. Etti also checked that the filter canister through which Rahim’s air passed was properly sealed. Next the gloves and galoshes. Rahim was barely strong enough to stand unassisted in the weight of the protective suit, but there was no choice for him. He had to wear it. To say that the agent they worked with was lethal was an understatement, the tiniest quantity of it capable of killing and doing so horribly — the ghastly deaths it visited on the test animals had proved that. The assistant helped Rahim to his workbench, where he would sit until she too was suited up.

‘Have the antidote ready, woman,’ he said.

‘Yes, doctor,’ Etti said obediently. She was already in the process of doing just that, anyway.

Etti removed the syringes marked ‘Atropine’ from the locked refrigerator and placed them within easy reach on the workbench. It was hot inside the suit and even a healthy person could not wear it for long; but it provided the best possible protection, so it was worth the discomfort. The time spent in the suit was critical where Rahim was concerned. Just forty-five minutes was all he could endure. That meant they had to work fast. ‘Come, doctor.’

Etti again checked that the seams were interlocked properly.

Rahim had cleverly devised a canister for the agent of death moulded from epoxy resin. Once sealed inside, the nerve agent commonly called VX was held in two parts. Each part was still deadly, but nowhere near as dangerous as when combined in the right proportions. When the time came, the canisters would shatter under the implosive force of shaped charges, combining the two solutions to become one of the most lethal weapons ever devised. Rahim’s innovation had further improved the delivery. The molecules of the epoxy would fuse with those of the agent to create a sticky, deadly slag that caused a hotspot beneath the point of detonation, the heavier epoxy particles coated with VX falling more rapidly to earth. There were four canisters in all, each capable of holding a little under five litres.

The schedule called for a final test. Rahim was still unsure of the optimum ratio of the two components. Everything had been prepared the previous day, including a third mixing drum containing the two parts of the VX combined. Rahim’s failing strength meant that his role had become largely supervisory, the way an old surgeon who’d lost the required sensitivity in his fingers might direct a young apprentice.

The assistant took the special tool Rahim had the machinists make and loosened the unusual bolts that fastened the lid on the heavy concrete drum. The bolts were well lubricated and easily released. The lid was heavy, and she grunted as she lifted it off and placed it on the floor. A second drum was revealed inside, as with a Russian doll, this one made of stainless steel itself encased in thick rubber. Rahim watched patiently, aware of his own short, hot breaths. Neither container carried any dire warnings, no indication of what lay within.

The lid on the second drum within the drum was simply unscrewed. Rahim took a torch and shone it into the darkness. It was less than a quarter full. Satisfied, he gestured at Etti to continue. She reached into the depths of the rubber flask with a small plastic cup attached to a long, thin extension — a ladle — and pushed it into the liquid. She paused to get her breath and then lifted the cup out, intensely aware that the contents were capable of killing more than a hundred thousand people. Her hand shook with its proximity to the fluid. The power of this mighty weapon made her feel faint. Slowly, slowly she raised the cup until she had it over the brim of the rubber canister and then swung it carefully across to the beaker on the benchtop. She began to pour it carefully, so very carefully, into the glass container. The liquid was a light honey colour and looked — strangely — good enough to drink.

And then suddenly, ka-boom! The shock wave of an explosion rattled the walls of their demountable, shattering two windows. Etti flinched with shock as the glass blew in. She froze for a moment and then looked up, sweat trickling down her brow. ‘Ignore it, concentrate,’ said Rahim tersely, his lack of health a keen example to her of the dangers of being distracted at critical moments.

The rat froze when the vibrations from the explosion hummed through the floor. And then a large splash of liquid had fallen from a height and plastered it along the centre of its back, almost rolling it over. A human’s foot shifted towards it, and the movement broke through its fear. The rat scampered off to the safety of a darkened corner, where Etti’s cat pounced on it.

Just on thirty minutes later, Rahim and Etti were done and the drum resealed. This trial would kill the last of the pigs and no more of these animals would be used to test the agent — they were too big and disposal of them was proving difficult. Etti steeled herself to check the floor under the table to see if any VX had been accidentally spilled. She believed a small amount had sloshed out of the ladle when the explosion had made her jump. Etti had not mentioned this to Rahim for fear of upsetting him. She looked on the floor under the workbench but the floorboards appeared to be clear of any telltale spatters. She told herself that she must have imagined the spillage and was enormously relieved — as much for the sake of her own health as for Rahim’s. She looked across the room and saw him slumped on a stool, exhausted.

Duat supervised the removal of the remains of the dead caused by the accident with the claymore mine while he inwardly cursed their stupidity. But accidents like this had happened before and they would happen again. Praise be to Allah that the death toll was not higher.

One of the carpenters ran up to Duat as he left the grisly scene at the weapons range and presented him with a yellow epoxy brick, a compressed tile of heroin buried deep within. At least here was some good news. Duat turned it over in his hand and smiled. That Rahim was indeed a genius.

The cat ran a considerable distance with the rat in its mouth. When it finally paused to inspect its catch in the rafters of its favourite hiding place, the cat found that the rodent had died. There was no opportunity to tease it, play with it. The hunter began to feast on its catch. Within a minute of licking its dinner’s fur, the cat began to convulse. Seconds later, it fell into a drainpipe, dead. The afternoon monsoon washed the animals, both contaminated with massive amounts of VX, into the encampment’s main water tank. There, they became stuck in a feeder pipe to the encampment’s mess.