The Identity Mine

XXXIII

The waters of Cape May’s Harbor of Refuge were silent and black as the small boat chugged its way north west toward a long stretch of Delaware coastline known as Slaughter Beach. Abrahem Nassir could not help but feel a grim amusement at the choice of names for the location of his entry into the United States.

The state of New Jersey was visible across the bay to his right, betrayed in the darkness by twinkling lights that were reflected across the rippling surface of the water. To his left beyond the sparsely populated coastline, just a hundred miles to the west, was Washington DC.

The enemy was close, he reflected, but he was closer. The narrow escape from the American soldiers in Somalia had cemented in both his mind and that of Tariq that there was no longer any time to waste. The Americans would locate the vessel Abrahem had used to travel from Kuwait to Somalia, interrogate its crew and learn of his movements. Abrahem doubted that the Somalian pirates would have held any loyalty to his cause once overpowered by the Americans, and it had only been Tariq’s quick thinking that had allowed them to escape among the women and children, overpowering two Americans on the way out and scattering into the sparse bush with the coming of the dawn. With too many targets to follow, the Americans had been misled and both Abrahem and Tariq had escaped south.

His journey across the Atlantic had been facilitated on a private jet owned by Tariq out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, the customs officials at the airport easily bribed. The flight had landed in Dakar, Senegal, to refuel before making the long flight across the Atlantic Ocean to land in the Dominican Republic. From there he had boarded a maritime ship bound for Maine before once again leaving the vessel en route off the coast of Delaware and being picked up by a smaller boat out of the town of Bowers, on the shores of the equally grotesquely named Murderkill River.

A deck hand approached him with a small cup of hot, sweet coffee. Abrahem took the cup with a nod and a smile of gratitude, his bones still aching from the bitter chill of the North Atlantic. Despite the provision of a life raft and food, Abrahem had been forced to wait over an hour for the small boat to locate him as he floated alone on the dark waters, praying to Allah that the United States Coast Guard would not stumble across him first. Good fortune had been on his side and he had remained undetected. Now, he sat wrapped in blankets as he waited for his muscles to warm up once more as the boat approached the shore.

America.

He had never seen the country before, despite hearing so much about it and having hated it with all the considerable passion in his heart for almost half of his life. The tranquil shores and twinkling lights against the starry sky reminded him somewhat of Basra, and for a moment he once again allowed himself the thought that perhaps the people of the two countries were not so different. It was the politicians who were to blame, the warmongering “hawks” of the American Senate and their thirst for oil, money and power. Everybody in their right mind in the entire world knew that the invasion of Iraq had been a business venture, a hostile take — over undertaken beneath the thin veil of the liberation of a country from the rule of a tyrant. What they didn’t shout so loudly was that one tyrant had merely been replaced by another, the flag waving democracy of the United States that had raped Iraq of its finances, its soul, and then abandoned it to crumble beneath the blind corruption of Islamic militants and warlords. Furthermore, it was now widely accepted around the world that America’s administration of the time had lied in order to justify the war; there had never been any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and anybody who had raised such a point had been ridiculed and even betrayed by that same administration.

Abrahem’s resolve hardened. The American people had voted for their leaders, who touted their democracy to the rest of the world as an example of leadership by the people, for the people, despite the fact that they then so brazenly acted without any consideration for those people in whose name they claimed their positions of power.

Abrahem recalled his youth, of the day when the Americans had first rolled into Basra to cheers and cries of gratitude. Abrahem had cheered with them, ecstatic at the presence of troops from a country where the voice of the people actually mattered, overjoyed at where their protection might take Iraq. And then the troops had fired all of the police and the army, and then the American companies had come into the city and begun rebuilding things that did not need rebuilding, repairing things that the Americans themselves had destroyed during their fighter — bomber attacks of “shock and awe“, had refused to employ the impoverished builders and artisans of Iraq in favor of paying their own people via the American government.

Throughout this, the Iraqi people had suffered more hardship than they had under Saddam Hussein, and when the uprisings began in Mosul and Basra and across the country the American companies abandoned their unnecessary projects unfinished, claiming a “lack of security”. Having created dissolution, poverty and dismay among ordinary Iraqis sufficient to cause a revolt, they then blamed that revolt for their failure to complete the rebuilding programs they had been paid such vast sums to undertake. They left, their pockets lined with all of the money in Iraq and abandoned hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead or dying, Abrahem’s beloved parents, siblings, wife and children among them.

The cup in his hand shattered and crashed to the deck. Abrahem blinked as he looked down and realized that he had crushed it, the jagged debris cutting into the palm of his hand. Blood glistened in the faint light as a deck hand approached, concern on his features.

‘Are you okay?’

The young man’s voice was tinged with the lilt of Arabic but also stained with the twang of an American. An immigrant, who had perhaps fled Iraq as Abrahem had been forced to do.

‘I am fine,’ he replied, his voice gravelly with pain and grief as he clenched his bloody fist. ‘How long until we make landfall?’

‘Ten minutes,’ the boy replied. ‘Our berth is just up river from here.’

Abrahem nodded but remained otherwise silent as he watched blood ooze from between his fingers and drip onto the deck at his feet. The deck hand watched him for a moment longer and then shrank away as so many people did, sensing somehow the unrivalled hatred that emanated from Abrahem like something alive. The time for his vengeance was now close and he vowed that this would be the last time the blood of his family would be spilled in the fight against American colonialism.

A sudden bright light flared to the north, swept across the water and shone directly at the boat as Abrahem looked up and heard an American voice echoing across the water.

‘United States Coast Guard! Unidentified vessel in the channel, heave to and prepare to be boarded!’

Abrahem felt surprise and fear pulse like a bolt of poison through his veins as the captain called aft to him in a harsh whisper.

‘They must already be looking for you!’

Abrahem should have known that the damned Americans would be waiting for him already. He had of course guessed that the Americans would assume his target to be in the United States but he enjoyed the thought of them panicking to reach him before he carried out his attack. The fear of his enemy was a pleasure for Abrahem, to be savored at every opportunity.

‘Get out of sight below decks!’

Abrahem whirled toward the boat’s stern and the hatch there that led into the depths of the boat. He opened the hatch and then let it close again with a dull thump before creeping further aft toward the boat’s stern rail. The inky black water surged with foam as the engines churned the river behind the boat, and Abrahem could already feel the chill embrace of the icy water as he pulled off his clothes. He only had one dry kit with him, having planned to get wet only once, and he knew that he would not survive long if he reached the shore in damp clothes. He placed his dry clothes carefully in the deepest, darkest corner of the deck that he could find.

As the boat came chugging to a halt on the river and the engines coughed to a halt, Abrahem slipped over the stern of the boat and vanished like a dangerous thought into the black water.

‘Prepare to be boarded!’

The crewman’s loud hailer echoed across the otherwise silent water, bounced back by the tree line a half mile away. The eighty seven foot coastal patrol boat on which the captain stood slowly eased in toward the small vessel that had chugged its way up the channel from the open ocean. Ordinarily such an act would not have concerned the Coast Guard, but with Delaware’s wide open coastline a haven for drugs coming up from the south, any boat in the channel at four o’clock in the morning was suspicious. More than once the Coast Guard had hauled hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of high — grade street drugs off small vessels just like this one.

The tug was grubby, patches of rust lining its cabin, and he could see only two men at the helm. Both were dark skinned, foreign looking, their hands in the air and their eyes squinting against the powerful lights flooding the tug’s deck. The captain had seen the reports issued by the Coast Guard alerting crews to a potential terrorist threat from illegal immigrants attempting to infiltrate the United States in Washington DC and the surrounding areas, and right now he felt tension aching in his joints as he called out again.

‘Keep your hands in the air where we can see them!’

The Coast Guard boat slid in alongside the tug and the captain, a pistol held in both hands close to his body, jumped across onto the tug’s deck. As the only part of the Department of Homeland Security that was also a part of the military, the Coast Guard patrol boat and its three crewmembers were all armed.

‘Take it easy,’ the captain said to the two sailors as he advanced upon the tug’s small wheel house. ‘Keep your arms up and turn around slowly.’

The two crewmen did as he commanded, turning around and facing the wheel as the captain moved behind them. He checked to ensure that he was covered by his comrades before he holstered his pistol and then cuffed them both.

‘What brings you out onto the water this late at night?’ he asked them as he turned them around.

‘Fishing,’ the older of the two said. ‘The bigger fish come out in the early hours.’

‘That’s true,’ the captain agreed. ‘But you need nets to fish them, so where’s your gear?’

‘We use floating nets,’ the younger man replied. ‘We put them out off shore and will return to them with the dawn.’

The captain eyed both of the men, his instincts tingling with the sense that something was amiss. He pulled his flashlight out and scanned the interior of the tug. As he swept the beam across the stern, he saw a small pile of clothes close to the stern rail.

Concern flashed through him like a bolt of lightning and he turned to shout a warning to the patrol boat as one hand reached for his pistol again.

‘You’d better call in, we’ve got a swimmer in the…’

The captain saw the bodies of his two colleagues lying on the deck of their patrol boat only for an instant before his view was blocked by a fast moving shadow that filled his vision.

The figure loomed at him, ghoulishly illuminated by the harsh white lights of the patrol boat. The captain glimpsed the naked man’s muscular body, water sparkling as it snaked down his flanks, his hair wet and lank and his eyes dark and fearsome as something flashed between them.

The captain felt a thin strip of white pain sear his throat as the naked man gripped his wrist and stayed his pistol. Warm blood flooded thickly down the captain’s chest as he was slammed against the wheelhouse, the naked man pinning him there as he struck with the blade once more. The wicked knife plunged deep into the captain’s throat, and though he writhed with terminal desperation the weapon sliced his arteries within seconds and the life drained out of his body as the darkness and the cold seeped in.

Abrahem watched the Coast Guard sailor’s body slump to the deck at his feet, which was now slick with blood still pumping from the deep wounds in the mariner’s neck. Beside him, he heard the younger of the tug’s two crewmen turn aside and vomit over the rail into the water.

‘There is not much time,’ Abrahem said as he turned to the older man. ‘The Coast Guard will be here within minutes once they realize they cannot contact their comrades. We must make shore and disappear.’

The tug’s captain glanced at the patrol boat and the bodies of the other two crewmen slumped against the controls. Abrahem had killed them silently, like some horrific beast of the night, and then moved back aboard the tug to finish off their captain. Now he stood in the harsh light, naked and smeared with thick blood, the blade dripping in his grasp.

‘Move, now!’ Abrahem snapped.

The captain and his crewman stumbled over themselves as they hurried to carry out his order, and Abrahem strolled to the stern and dried himself.

America will know now for certain that I have arrived, he realized.

And he smiled in the darkness.