The Last Infidel Read online

  Cody’s work crew, with one voice, began to yell and curse at Cody.

  Jose watched through the window as Jadhari climbed into an old, beat up pickup truck and drove away from the square. Then he smiled and yelled, “He’s gone!”

  Cody’s men rose to their feet and cheered. Since Tracy had shown Cody the tunnels beneath the buildings on the square, and since he’d told his men about them, a number of men had taken to stealing food. Every night at midnight, two men would use the tunnels and find and take anything they could from the surrounding buildings.

  Cody raised his hands in the air and the room fell silent. “I’m not pretending that everything’s guns and roses around here – and you know I always tell you what you need to know. But I do have a treat for all of you today. Jose will fill you in.”

  Jose finished what remained of his water and stood up. “All of you know that Bashar is under orders to kill us all on the day after Ramadan, which is Wednesday morning, only four mornings from now. But two of our men, Billy and David, have been stealing ISA clothing. We now have enough suits for everyone, which means we are all going to – well, you know, so I won’t say it. But, come Wednesday morning, each of us will be on our way south.”

  “Each man will have a pack with enough rations for two days or more,” Cody said. “I assume each of you has a blade of some sort – but if you don’t, be sure to come up with something. How we get out of here you won’t know until the moment it happens. But I assure you that you will be successful.”

  “Billy is also preparing for each of you five, ten-ounce gold coins in the event you are caught,” Jose said. “You know how corrupt these bastards are. Or you can bring a goat, because there are a lot of lonely ISA soldiers out there these days.”

  The room erupted in laughter.

  “If you can get a gun, it’s your business,” Cody said. “But make sure you label it and give it to Jose so he can hide it. If you have any questions, see me during the work day.”

  By eight o’clock, and not a minute later, Cody’s men were at the mosque, all of them eager with their inspections and touch ups.

  Cody, not to mention Jadhari’s guards, noticed the change in the men, how they hurried along with their tool boxes, smiling and talking to one another. He wondered if he should have told them to keep their joy under wraps, finally deciding that maybe it was a good thing to keep the guards wondering and worrying.

  At ten o’clock, Jose found Cody standing just inside the main entrance of the mosque with his head tilted up towards the ceiling. He handed him a small piece of dried meat, what it was he didn’t know, but Cody enjoyed it all the same.

  “It’s hard to imagine it,” Cody said. “This building will hold nearly five thousand people for one prayer service – and you and I are responsible for one of the greatest architectural wonders in the modern world.”

  “Yeah, and who would have thought it?” Jose said. “I mean, right in the middle of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.”

  “Do you think they’ll put up one of those historical markers with our names on it?”

  “Like that’s gonna happen,” Jose said, and he took a drink from his canteen. “You know, you’re starting to act like a sheriff again. That was quite a work over you did on Jadhari, may he burn in hell, last night and this morning. I thought you were a dead man for sure.”

  “I Surprised myself,” Cody laughed. “You can act timidly when it comes to the small things. I thought I’d tell him the truth – that we burned down his little playpen – because he’d never believe it. Bold always carries the day.”

  Jose handed his canteen to Cody. “But I still don’t get Tracy. Zafar – he’s dead as a doornail. And she’s good. She can get out of here if she wants, but she don’t want that. She wants that C-4 of yours. What she can do with it now, I haven’t any idea. I mean, without Zafar, she doesn’t have any connections. She’s like dead in the water.”

  “Never underestimate Tracy,” Cody said with a raised eyebrow. “She suddenly wants to use the bombs for small things. You know, here and there, like the terrorists used to do back when we were still a country. Thinks she can do some good that way.”

  “We could never get the bombs in here, though,” Jose said. “They had me down to my underwear this morning, even asked me to show them my cojones – can you believe that?”

  “And I know exactly where we could put those bombs, too,” Cody said, shaking his head. “But the president of the mosque – if you can believe that – brings dogs in here at night, bomb-sniffing dogs. Allah must allow it.”

  Jose rolled his eyes. “I thought they hated dogs, like they were against their religion.”

  “They kill women for cheating on their husbands, but the husbands are screwing little boys and sheep,” Cody said. “Go figure.”

  “Maybe you should just give Tracy some of your bombs and let her go to work. Maybe that’ll make her happy.”

  Cody turned around and looked out across the uneven and potholed gravel parking lot. A truck was coming, dodging the deep holes, swerving this way and that. “Well, I guess it’s time for me to lick Jadhari’s wounds a little. I’ll see you later.” He handed the canteen back to Jose.

  Jadhari, with two of his men, one the driver, the other his body guard, pulled up to the front of the mosque and got out of the old pickup truck. Five other guards, all standing under the shade of the mosque’s front porch, hurried out to see him. They all gathered around their boss.

  “We are just going to have to make some of the soldiers work,” Jadhari’s guard suggested, with his hands folded in front of him. “We have many, of course, and they are best when it comes to fighting, but they can all use a shovel.”

  Jadhari waved for the guard to be silent. “My idea, exactly. Let us scour the town for shovels. And while we’re at it, we will make the president of the mosque work, too.”

  Another guard, one of rank, leaned over and whispered something to Jadhari.

  Jadhari pulled out his small, rubber truncheon and beat the man over the head, knocking his camouflage hat off. “I do not care who hears me! If they wanted all of this gravel smoothed out, they should have said something!”

  “We should have no problem clearing a path from the road to right here in front of the mosque,” another man said. “At least the president will have a nice place to park.”

  “And did I ask you for your opinion?” Jadhari barked, with his fist up in the air. “Am I surrounded by incompetents or what?”

  A guard came out of the mosque and stepped up behind Cody. “He’s your friend, why don’t you go talk some sense into him? All the guards would appreciate that.”

  Cody rubbed his hand across his face. What kind of world was this, where a guard, who would normally take glee in beheading a man, raping his wife and children, and then take pleasure in torturing them to death, speak so kindly with one of his victims? Darkness. Plain and simple. “Jadhari would never see the light.”

  “What was that, Cody Marshall?” the guard asked.

  “Never mind,” Cody said, and he walked across the gravel towards the one-sided fight taking place beneath the hot, summer sun.

  Jadhari saw Cody coming. He pointed at Cody and said, “You are not a Muslim, so don’t say anything!”

  “Okay, I won’t say anything,” Cody said, and he turned and walked back towards the shade.

  “What was it you just said?” Jadhari yelled at another guard. “If you don’t shut up, I will beat you, too! Just round up a hundred shovels, that is my order! And bring up a hundred soldiers, today!”

  The guards saluted and hurried towards the shade of the mosque. One of them had a notepad and started writing while another spoke.

  Jadhari hurried over to Cody. “I don’t like looking small in front of my men,” he said.

  “Then keep your pants on, Jadhari,” Cody said.

  “That’s very funny. Very, very funny.”

  “The parking area is really no big deal, Jadhari,” Cody remarke
d, looking out over the uneven, potholed mess that stretched a hundred yards to the road. “And you have it right. Get me a couple hundred of your men, shovels, wheel barrows, and pick axes, and I’ll have this place cleaned up by Monday.”

  “You know, that courthouse – every room – is filled with the Imam’s men and officers,” Jadhari said. “And the Imam? He says, ‘Oh, it’s too hot to come out today!’ and he orders Bashar---”

  “That would be your dad, right?”

  Jadhari stepped backwards. “He . . . how do you---?”

  “Your dad and I are friends,” Cody said, as he put his arm on Jadhari’s back. “Well, at least I am on my part. I’ve known for years,” he said, lying.

  “And you still like me?”

  “Like you? Hell, you didn’t beat me this morning. That’s gotta count for something.”

  “But I’ve never beaten you.”

  “See what I mean?” Cody said with a smile. “And I have a lot to be grateful for – you’ve killed how many men now?”

  “I don’t remember, so don’t remind me.”

  “But you’ve never killed me.”

  “And I won’t kill you, Cody,” Jadhari said, and he threw his arms up. “How have we ever come to this?”

  “The Koran, I think. And that brilliant con artist – what’s his name? – Mohammed.”

  “Yes – and you know, I never really liked reading his book. But they made me memorize parts of it. All I ever wanted to do was get married, settle down, and that’s it.”

  “Why don’t you just give us all some guns, let us mow down all these guards and all of the other soldiers on the square at the next execution, and give yourself something to smile about?” Cody asked Jadhari, waiting for a reply from his old friend, who seemed stung speechless by the suggestion.

  “Just let’s come up with a plan for the driveway and the parking spaces, okay?” Jadhari shot back with fervor. “And if you say anything like that again, I will kill you. Maybe. Have you eaten lunch yet?”

  “Just what I was going to ask you about,” Cody said. “But you told me there’d be no lunch today. Nor dinner. But since I’m going to solve this latest problem of yours, can you rustle up a barbecued goat by tonight?”

  Jadhari, without a thought, whistled, and one of his men came running over. “Take the truck – get Nabeeb on this right away. And I mean right now. I want a young goat, cooked over hickory, by six tonight. It is to be delivered to the hardware store. Go, hurry, like it was yesterday.”

  Cody smiled. He put his arm around Jadhari and walked him towards the shade. “How many officers did you say were staying up at the courthouse?”

  { 19 }

  “You must be Mr. Marshall, I presume.”

  Cody looked at the tall, light-skinned man and nodded. He must have been one of Bashar’s army cooks, the one Jadhari called Nabeeb. Cody said, “I want you to know how much we appreciate the dinner tonight. Seems like a year since we had fresh meat.”

  “It is my pleasure,” Nabeeb said, looking around suspiciously. “My wife Marwa and I cannot help but think that we are at the right place at the right time.”

  The door to the hardware store opened, and two Muslim women, each with their faces covered, each of them carrying large cardboard boxes covered in foil, came inside. They set the two boxes down on the floor in the dining hall. Nabeeb waited a second or two, looking back towards the door, and then he waved for the two women to join him.

  “I hear you are the man who can get things done around here,” Nabeeb said softly.

  “No, that would be Jose. He’s the guy making the deals these days.”

  “No, that’s not what I hear,” Nabeeb said. “You never came to our restaurant, you know, back in the day, but you might remember it. Nabob’s Kabobs?”

  “Seems like I remember something by that name, back in the day. Seems like you know the local southern dialect.”

  “My wife and I were born and raised here. We don’t even know Arabic – and so we don’t even read the Koran in the original language like we’re supposed to do. Heck, we never read it. When we go to prayers? We don’t even have a clue what we’re saying.”

  Jose came down the stairs. He and another man picked up the boxes, set them up on the table, and uncovered them. The smell of hickory-smoked goat, sweet and fresh, steamed up into the air. They began setting the long table.

  Nabeeb pulled Cody up close to him and said, “Mohammed – may he burn in hell where he belongs.” He stood back, smiled, and held his palms up, apparently pleased with himself. “Would a real Muslim say that?” he asked with a smile stretching from ear to ear.

  “I don’t believe in Mohammed, but I draw the line when it comes to blasphemy,” Cody said. “Why are you telling me all this? Make it fast because I have a long night ahead of me.”

  “My daughter and her boyfriend – they need out,” Nabeeb said. “We’ve been hiding him now for the last two years, and he and my daughter, they have been playing hide the salami.”

  Cody scrunched up his eyes and tilted his head.

  “Anyway, they – well, you know, they’re both sixteen and the world is going to hell – they’re both alive so, you know the rest. She’s pregnant. I can always say I did it – that’s accepted in Islam. You know, we can screw our daughters. But I don’t know how that even works.”

  “Eww,” one of the women said. “That’s really gross, you know that?”

  “But her boyfriend has the blondest hair and bluest eyes you’ve ever seen – my wife says he makes her wish she was single, and that she could be in his harem.”

  “Can’t you ever be serious?” the other woman said, only with a low, suspicious, masculine voice.

  “So, when this baby is born, our grandson, he, or she, will not look like your typical Muslim devil. And you know what will happen after that.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Cody said after a moment’s thought, eyeing the two burka-clad women. “You . . . you brought them here?”

  “A certain Tracy tells me that you can fix this,” Nabeeb said. “If you can at least hide them until the troops start moving, I might be able to lose some---” He looked around the room one more time. “I might manage to lose some guns and food, if you know what I mean.”

  Cody rolled his eyes. “I swear I’m going to end up getting myself killed one of these days. Follow me, all of you.”

  Cody led Nabeeb and the two women up the steps. The sleeping quarters were empty. He stopped at the top of the steps. “Okay, Nabeeb, which one is your daughter?”

  “That would be this one,” he said, as he tugged on one of the burkas. “No, not this one. The other.”

  Cody leaned forward and looked into the eye slits of one of the burkas. “Aw, heck. I can’t tell.” He knelt down and started to lift the hem of the burka.

  “Hey!” the young girl said. “You can’t do that!”

  “Then you can go back to where you came from,” Cody said.

  “Alright, you two,” the girl said to her father and her boyfriend. “Turn around.”

  Nabeeb closed his eyes and shook his head. He and the burka-clad boy turned around.

  The girl lifted up her dress, starting from the hem at her feet, and lifted it up well over her head. “Are you satisfied yet?”

  Cody laughed. “It takes a lot more than that to satisfy me.”

  The girl dropped her burka. “Like, I’m not good enough for you to look at?”

  “I’ve got stuff on under my burka,” the boy said as he turned back around.

  “I’ll bet you do,” Cody said, impatiently. “Just make it fast.”

  The young man pulled up his burka, revealing a nice pair of blue jeans and an even nicer short sleeved button down. He wore better stuff than even Jose could get.

  “Yep, bluest and blondest,” Cody said. “You two are in real trouble. What were you thinking?”

  “What did you think about when you were our age, mister?” the girl asked.

 
; “I had a job.”

  “If you can hide them, or better, get them away from here, I can feed you and arm you,” Nabeeb said. “But that’s all I can do. I have nothing else.”

  Cody looked at Nabeeb closely, looking at his facial expressions and his eyes. Then he asked him, “How long have you been cooking for Bashar’s soldiers?”

  “Not all of them,” Nabeeb said. “Just for a couple hundred men, that’s all.”

  “Would you be willing to poison them?”

  “But it would look strange if everybody sat down to eat and never got back up again.”

  “I don’t mean kill them. I’m talking about making them sick enough to make them weak.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Just be here early Tuesday morning,” Cody said, his voice barely audible. “Three o’clock. Right here.”

  Jose came hurrying up the steps and saw Cody. “Time to eat – and everybody’s waiting.”

  “Jose, take these two kids down to Tracy. But make sure nobody sees you. Can you do that?”

  “Sure, boss,” Jose said.

  “And you, Mr. Nabeeb, need to hold up your end of the bargain. Food, guns and, well . . . the food prep we talked about for Tuesday morning, the morning meal before the last day of Ramadan.”

  Mr. Nabeeb smiled and bowed. He said goodbye to his daughter and her boyfriend, hugging each one with tears in his eyes, and left.

  Cody looked over at Jose and said, “Blindfold them and take them down. Then meet me at the table.”

  Ten minutes later – Cody held up the evening’s meal until Jose returned – everyone sat down and enjoyed the meal. Nabeeb, under orders from Jadhari, had prepared an exceptional menu, one not even allowed to Bashar’s men. Not only was there goat meat, perfectly grilled and smoked with hickory, seasoned to perfection, but potatoes and gravy to go with it.

  “You know Cody,” Jose said. “You’ve been saying all these years that you don’t care about this war. Like you’ve just given up. And I’ve seen you throw away people, too.”

  Cody wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve and said, “What of it?”