Rotten Gods (16 page)

Malik strokes his beard. ‘I noticed rust in the corners of the doors.'

‘Did the men who were with them get into the car?'

‘Yes. One was the driver.'

‘Were there any other identifying marks?'

‘There was a decal on the vehicle, on the back window. Those stick-on numbers you can buy at a stationery shop.'

‘Do you remember what the number was?'

‘No, sorry. I think there was maybe a three and a two, but I cannot be sure.'

‘What about the licence plate?'

‘Sorry. I did not look. I was curious, but not that curious.'

Simon lowers his eyes, frustrated. ‘Tell me about the men.'

‘One was very dark — African. The other had lighter skin.' He hesitates. ‘I … er, think I have seen him again, but I am not sure.'

‘Where?'

Malik picks up the newspaper that was face down on the table. Like all Arabic tabloids the front page is what would be the back in the West. Two grainy photographs dominate the cover. One is Dr Abukar, scholarly and, to all appearances, incapable of violence. To his right is a sharply featured face. The word underneath is in English script: Zhyogal.

‘I am insane,' Malik says, ‘but he looked so much like that one there. The more I look, the more I am certain. Yes. I recognise him as I would the devil. He was … a frightening man.'

Simon stares down at that face with a swelling hatred that he knows he will never control.

 

Marika wakes once during the night. The cell is dark, and strange shadows move across the walls. Huddled in one corner she hears the moaning howl of a man in agony, the sound of voices, then moaning again. Fighting the ache in face and abdomen where
she was hit, she sits up, aware that the hairs on the back of her neck and her forearms are standing erect, as if in a reaction to something primordial and terrible out there in the darkness of this hellhole in the wilderness.

The sound becomes a shriek, and then low sobbing. There is something familiar in that voice, and a terrible, sickening awareness settles upon her.

Now it is his turn.

As if in sympathy, Marika holds both hands against her face and weeps until tears coat her cheeks, and her throat aches with the acid gall of shared suffering.

And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.' And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land'. And it was good.

Yet the land has been disturbed and tunnelled through to find gold and oil, and poisoned with radioactive waste, sewers, and heavy metals that fall in the ash from the sky. The earth has been so denuded of nutrients that farmers pile seabird droppings on the fields, but now even the guano is running out.

God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.'

Biotech companies engineer plant genomes to make them resistant to disease and herbicides; to grow faster; to bear more fruit. The number of species under cultivation dwindles. Engineered species ‘infect' their wild cousins, and the gene pool narrows. When drought comes, engineered plants wilt — all of them, for there is no longer the genetic diversity required to cope with change.

Diverse ecosystems such as rainforests are cleared at a rate of one hundred thousand acres every week. Soils planted to
monoculture are leached of all fertility by unseasonable flooding rains, or blown away by the powder-dry winds of drought.

And there was evening and there was morning. The third day.

Day 3, 04:55

In Karachi, Pakistan, sixteen-year-old Sehba Hamid reads
The Way of Jihad
by Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He sits on a hand-embroidered cushion in a one-room house thick with the smell of incense and the open sewer on the street. The tract sets out the case for war, why all Muslims must fight. He reads the words:

My brothers! The ummah that knows how to die a noble and honourable death is granted an exalted life in this world and eternal felicity in the next. Degradation and dishonour are the results of the love of this world and the fear of death. Therefore prepare for jihad and be the lovers of death …

New meaning awakens and grows; a sense that Sehba's life may have purpose, that he too can be a warrior. That he can rise above the squalor of his surroundings and bring glory to God.

At the madrasah an older man makes contact with him, one who keeps himself apart. A man known for silent purity and intolerance of vice. The others whisper that he belongs to the al-Muwahhidun. Over several days the recruiter sounds Sehba out, then invites him to a meeting.

Sehba listens to what they have to say, then decides that he will join with them, and if he is required to die in the name of God, he will do it willingly. A sense of joy pervades his soul.

 

Zhyogal, warrior for Islam, beloved of the Prophet, has been known by many names over the years, moving across borders like a phantom, new passports just an encrypted email and a dead letter drop away.

He was born Sami Kazaati, in Illizi, Algeria, in 1983, between the desert of Issaouane Irarraren and the mountains of Tassilin-Ajjer. He was still a student at the village school when friction between Islamist protesters and the government reached a peak with the slaughter of more than forty civilians at the Place des Martyrs, Algiers, by security forces.

As if knowing that control was slipping from his grasp, the President, Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, announced major reforms, including free speech, the right to form and join political parties, and ultimately, democratic elections. The most powerful new party was the Front Islamique du Salut, the FIS, led by Abassi Madani, a university professor.

The 1990 elections were won by the FIS over the hated Chadli regime. The second stage, the parliamentary elections of a year later, would have finished with the same result had not the army stepped in, annulled the elections, and suspended the second stage of voting, effectively taking control of the country. The FIS and the general populace were enraged. Algeria embarked on a civil war that became known as La Sale Guerre — The Dirty War.

The path to extremism and violence was inevitable for Sami. His three brothers fought for the FIS, and he was thirteen when they carried the eldest home on a broken door, his left arm hanging from the bloody shoulder muscle by a thread. He lived for three hours before loss of blood took his life. This was the day that Sami learned to hate. The day he picked up a weapon for himself.

As a teenager, Sami fought the dirty war like a hardened adult, blowing up electricity installations, burning churches, ambushing foreign workers, and beheading captured members of the security forces. He developed a talent for killing, but also political awareness, learning from events in the rest of the Muslim world; from the Shi'ites who were then pioneering suicide-bombing techniques in Lebanon, with devastating effect.

By the end of the war, he was a trusted lieutenant to the GSPC's Hassan Khattab, and was chosen to attend an al-Qa'ida-sponsored training camp in Sudan. Here, the training was fifty per cent martial, fifty per cent spiritual. He learned to fire, strip and clean a dozen different handguns, assault rifles and submachine guns. He learned to aim and fire an Igla 9K38 shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft rocket launcher, to manufacture explosives and Molotov cocktails. He learned to control and inspire men but most of all, to use his faith to break down barriers. His spiritual cup was filled by days of instruction by Salman al-Awdah, an advisor to bin Laden himself.

Sami learned that saving Africa and the tenets of his religion were intertwined. That the only possible future was under Sharia law.

There, at the camp, mingling with men of twenty nationalities, he was no longer Sami Kazaati, becoming instead Zhyogal — so named by a Chechen member of the mujahedin, for his stealth, his endless cunning, and his way of moving silently, looking in all directions as if sniffing for danger. Urged on by men of Iran, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, he adopted the rigorous interpretation of the Sharia as practised by the men around him.

Books such as
Teaching to Pray
, by Dr Abdullah bin-Ahmad al-Zayd, called for all Muslims of purity to unite, preaching that
it was not a sin to execute those who followed what the author regarded as impure forms of Islam. Zhyogal was also taken with the works of Syed Qutb, a revisionist thinker, and inspiration to modern Sunni activists.

It was through a man of about his own age, however, a Nigerian called Saif al-Din, that Zhyogal came to al-Muwahhidun. The initiation was complex. Under the pale light of the shawwal moon, the sign that marks the end of Ramadan and advent of Eid al-Fitr, Saif slit the throat of a living goat and removed the jugular like a hose, using it to fill a bowl with dark, sticky blood, warm as sunshine.

Their hands joined in the bowl while Saif led Zhyogal through an oath, accepting the sacred entrustment that authorised the use of evil in dire circumstances, as a necessity to defeat His enemies. And what time could be more dire than now? When only God's law could save the people of North Africa and Arabia from the West, who have raped the earth and her people to the point of destruction.

Almohadism was a drug to fill the empty places of his soul — the soul of a true warrior. Saif al-Din became more friend than teacher. He was like no one Zhyogal had ever met, with eyes like beacons. The two were inseparable: learning together; sleeping huddled for warmth on desert exercises.

Zhyogal became what he had always thirsted to be: ghazi, an Islamic warrior in the tradition of the fabled janissary, yet so much more. In Nigeria's Delta Region, he and Saif al-Din commanded their own force of elite mujahedin, joining a wave of terror fighting, attacking government soldiers wherever they could be found, slaughtering any man wearing a uniform; stopping vehicles and killing; breaking down doors and killing; on and on until the smell of death became the smell of life. A dozen times they blew
up oil pipelines, once making world headlines with the severing of Chevron's main pipeline south-west of Warri.

A few years later, Zhyogal, now a seasoned freedom fighter, leader and strategic planner — met with two high ranking men at a Somali version of the Khalid bin Waleed training camp, a facility of the same name once having been located in Afghanistan on the road to Khost.

One of these men was called Abdel Bakhi and the other Mounir Khalaf. ‘It is time,' they declared, ‘for you to join al-Jama'a al-Ashara, the council. It is time to show the West that Muslim lands can no longer be ravaged at will. That we will not permit them to poison the earth indefinitely.'

That moment changed Zhyogal's life. No longer was he merely a man waging jihad, but a leader of a semi-mystical movement that would save the world and bring all God's lands back into His fold. His heart felt as if it would burst with emotion, and that year he made the hajj for the second time to show his gratitude and increasing piety.

Zhyogal took on this new role with unsleeping fervour, slipping across borders, meeting in halls and forest clearings with leaders of fifty disparate tribes, people united by their passion for God and His Prophet. Recruiting. Spreading the faith. Showing these people that the storms and droughts that ravaged their crops were the direct result of the industrial powers of the West. That tampering with the earth's core through deep drilling and fracking was causing seismic unrest on an unprecedented scale.

With Saif, he organised and outfitted an Algerian cell of al-Muwahhidun which parked a school bus loaded with two and a half tonnes of nitrate fertiliser outside the United States Embassy in Algiers, blowing the eastern wing of the building into dust and rubble. Eight Americans and forty-two Algerians were killed.

The organisation, funded by donations from all around the world, sent technicians and money through a clearing house and communications centre in Sana'a, Yemen. From his position on al-Jama'a al-Ashara, Zhyogal became privy to information just a handful of men around the world shared.

Always he remembered the words of the Lion Sheikh, Osama bin Laden, as passed on by Yaqub Yusuf.

The West will not listen without massive bloodletting. They heed only fear and death.

 

Al-Moler, the TBM, weighs just under sixty tonnes, with a diameter of four-point-seven metres and a length of twelve. The business end is a cutting wheel, and behind it, a conveyor system that carries earth away from the face. An array of hydraulic jacks both support and move the mechanism as it bites into the earth.

Faruq watches the unloading like a Western father might watch his wife give birth. The ten-tonne Hitachi excavator scrapes out the initial bed for al-Moler, filling a procession of dump trucks with yellow soil in the predawn light. Contractors have been at work during the night, fencing off the site. Signwriters have affixed massive blue signs announcing that a hotel will be built. People are used to that here. It will raise few eyebrows and, if God wills it, before traffic starts moving on the roads, al-Moler will be deep underground doing what she does best: eating the earth like a beast.

Faruq knows from the sting in his eyes and ache in his shoulders that he is tired, yet mentally he feels alert. It has been interesting to see what he can do, working outside the world of permits and regulations — just picking up the phone and saying, ‘Go, go, go.' No environmental assessments, no cultural impact statements. Watching doors open. Taking phone calls at three
o'clock in the morning from suppliers of everything from prefab concrete ballast to water tankers that will be required as work in the tunnel progresses.

The purpose-designed crane that supports al-Moler in its slings is not tall but squat, the body covering a massive area, with thirty-two lugged, solid rubber tyres and floor stands to keep it from tipping.

Faruq lifts the radio handset and presses the transmit button. ‘Idiot! Slower. Hold her still. Do you want to keep your job? Would you rather shovel goat shit for a living?'

Al-Moler stops, swinging in its slings.

Faruq lifts the radio again. ‘Now, move.' He turns to look at the excavator in the pit, its bucket arm locking and unlocking with the dexterity of a human wrist, dumping a car-sized load of earth with each scoop, filling one truck before the next moves into line.

Faruq strides ahead of the crawling crane, the smell of raw earth thick in his nostrils — a smell that to him is as intoxicating as any drug. The pit is twice as wide as al-Moler and one and a half times as long. In depth it is perhaps six metres, and the floor has a five to one gradient in order to give the machine an angle to work with, aiming her down to the planned operating depth of thirty-five metres.

Faruq himself shot the laser levels they used to get the pit right, but he trusts his eyes more. He lifts the handset again. ‘Kamal, take the skin off the back rear. There is a hump there.'

In just a few scoops it is done. The last truck rolls away, and the excavator tucks the bucket up and rumbles backwards.

Now the crane positions al-Moler above the pit.

‘That is well done, Salamah. You have learned to drive, praise God. Now, nice and slow.'

Lifting his eyes over the pit, Faruq sees the waiting concrete trucks, snail-like rotating tanks turning, mixing the wet aggregate inside. Flat bed trucks are stacked high with steel reinforcing, for as soon as al-Moler moves off, the pit will be poured with quick-setting cement before the business of shoring up the tunnel begins.

Now, however, al-Moler settles to the ground and Faruq is first into the pit, thick yet agile fingers lifting off the hooks that fasten the straps. Then the crane arm drifts away and Faruq looks up to see the sun almost ready to peep over the horizon. He grins to himself. Hadn't he promised that al-Moler would be operating by dawn? And that he would be at the controls?

Other men swarm over the machine, ready for the series of checks that precede al-Moler entering operational status. Faruq works his way towards the hatch. This will be the pinnacle of his career. His name might soon be famous. It is worth a week of diversion to be that way.