The Last Infidel Read online

  “You think whoever put this here isn’t coming back for it? Fine then.”

  Cody cleared his throat and looked at Lisa. “Will you settle for just any type of silenced rifle?”

  “I’m a realist, Cody,” Lisa said. “What do you think?”

  Cody looked at Marcus and said, “Thanks for telling me.” He stuck his finger into Marcus’ ribs and rubbed the top of the boy’s head. Then he hugged him. He made his way towards the rubble heap on the other end of the basement, turned and smiled at Lisa, and slipped out into the darkness.

  Five in the morning. Dawn was only minutes away.

  Cody Marshall, the six-foot-one, twenty-nine-year-old ex-sheriff of Rutherford County, the manager overseeing the construction crew building Bashar’s new mosque, looked across the piles of trash towards the road to Woodbury. In the darkness, standing near piles of debris and multi-colored pieces of garbage, everything from metal roofing to soda cans and tall weeds, a single man like him, dressed in blue jeans and a red shirt, was just another piece of wreckage. Out here, Cody could probably walk up to one of Bashar’s patrols, slap the officer in the face, and never be seen.

  He climbed into his blue, custom, Ford F-150 pickup and started the engine. He made his way slowly up Hall’s Hill Pike, heading towards the university; but he kept his headlights off. When he crossed the old intersection where Halls Hill Pike crossed MTSU Boulevard and became Greenland Drive, he turned the lights on. Five minutes later, he drove onto the town square, parked his truck, and got out.

  Cody Marshall looked across the street from the courthouse parking lot. He carefully studied the goings on behind the glass window of the dimly lit See You Latte Café. Just a Hispanic and a white guy. Doable, especially since the Hispanic guy was Jose Lozano, the local black marketeer with customers on both sides of the war, and who happened to be Cody’s foreman for the mosque job. Cody had had to arrest him a few times in the past, before the war, even though they’d grown up together. But that was all in the past, forgiven, if not forgotten.

  Cody hurried across the street and stepped up onto the old cobblestone walk. He peaked inside the door, called for cup of coffee, and took a seat at a small, wooden table outside, just in front of the cafe. The weather felt cooler this morning, less humid; and that meant easier breathing at the work site. A couple of Bashar’s men, older, tired-looking guys, were arguing in front of the courthouse. To Cody’s right, two guards leaned against the doors of the old Rutherford County Health Clinic building, which had now become a police station. To the left, on the east side of the square, a half dozen of his construction workers gathered around a Muslim street vendor bartering for their breakfast. He put his elbows on the table, put his face in his hands, and closed his eyes. He listened for the six o’clock bell, but it never came. Time didn’t count in hell, he thought. Why would it count here?

  Cody quickly raised his head and looked towards East Main Street. The door to the See You Latte Café swung open and Jose, with a mug of coffee in his hands, stepped out.

  Cody and Jose heard the squealing of tires a block or two away. Then the crash of something metal. Cody got up and walked to the edge of the sidewalk in time to see an old Fed Ex van being driven through the stop sign at East Main. The van turned sharply to the right and drove up onto the curb where it took out an old, blue mailbox. The driver got the van back on the road, turned left, and skidded to a stop.

  Four Muslims jumped out of the vehicle. They brandished new rifles, rifles not normally used by Bashar’s men, and they hurried towards the tall oak doors of the Greenspan Realty and Auction building, the business next door to the café. A fifth man jumped out of the back with a small battering ram.

  “You’ve gotta hand it to Bashar’s men,” Cody said to Jose. “They really know how to drive.”

  The four armed men, all of them dark-skinned middle easterners, stepped aside and allowed the man with the battering ram to step up to the door.

  “Old Fred will have a surprise or two for these guys,” Cody said, reaching slowly around to his back pocket. “He has those doors bolted up, down, and sideways. By now he’s grabbing his forty-five. But I’ll bet you two mercury dimes Fred gets thrown from the third-story window.”

  “No, they’re gonna shoot him,” Jose said. “I’ll raise you a silver half, but only after we get under cover.”

  “I’ll see that bet,” Cody said, taking hold of his chrome handcuffs, slipping them quietly from his rear pocket so Jose wouldn’t notice. He looked at Jose and motioned towards the door of the café.

  Jose turned towards it.

  With a quick step and the flick of his wrist, Cody, with frightening speed, locked a cuff around Jose’s right wrist. The other cuff he locked around his own left wrist.

  Jose spun around, whey-faced and horror-stricken. He then turned and looked nervously at Bashar’s men, who had just started to swing the battering ram against the door. Then he turned and looked at the door of the café, and then back at Cody.

  “What are you afraid of?” Cody asked. “Don’t you want to see who wins the bet?”

  “This . . . this isn’t fair,” Jose said, his voice high-pitched and shaky.

  Cody raised a single brow, rubbed the light colored stubble on his face, and said, “Twenty years ago this summer.”

  Jose scrunched his dark eyebrows together and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The doors to Fred’s building crashed open with the second swing of the ram, and Bashar’s men ran in, yelling and screaming like Muslims always did.

  “I . . . I uncuffed you when that train was at least half a mile away, not when it was like fifty feet away!”

  “So, you do remember,” Cody said. “Half mile? Nah. A tenth of a mile – and I could feel the tracks vibrating.”

  Gunfire rang out, four or five shots, loud and sharp. A window shattered – one of the second floor windows – and glass came raining down onto the cobblestone below.

  “That would be Fred’s forty-five,” Cody said. “Hell of a gun – I’d love to have it.”

  “But that was like a hundred years ago, man!” Jose yelled.

  “Twenty, Jose. You left me on the tracks for an hour – sixty minutes,” Cody replied, looking at his watch. “You stand here with me for sixty seconds and we’ll call it even. It’s a deal – you’re getting away with ten cents on the dollar! You live for those kinds of deals, right?”

  “But Bashar’s men – they don’t take sixty seconds. And they use a hell of lot more bullets, too!”

  Cody smiled and looked up at the sky and rubbed his strong, angular jaw. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the heavens. “Maybe Fred’s wearing a bomb vest and he’s going to take out Bashar’s men – that’d be a blast, right?” He jerked on the cuffs, dragging Jose closer to the door of the realty building like a man walking a reluctant dachshund.

  “Come on, man!” Jose yelled, tugging Cody in the opposite direction. “You’re crazy to be joking around at a time like this! I shoulda left you on the tracks that day!”

  “Would have been better that way,” Cody said, looking sideways at Jose. “You know? I was just thinking.”

  “Thinking? At a time like this?”

  “Remember Dottie, the girl who’d won the beauty pageant a few years ago? You remember she lived out on Red Mile road by the---”

  “I don’t want to remember!”

  Another two shots rang out. Still Fred’s forty-five.

  Jose trembled, then he got down on his knees and closed his eyes. Cody gave him some slack, and Jose put his hands together and began mumbling a prayer in Spanish.

  “A real hero, that Dottie,” Cody said calmly. “When Bashar’s men found out she was hiding – and you remember how her dad used to use TNT to blow old stumps out of the ground – she made those bastards come up three flights of steps to the attic. Those horny sons of Satan – they went right for her skirt like rabid dogs after fresh kitten.”

  More gunshots.


  Jose prayed frantically.

  “And I’ll be danged if that girl didn’t take out the entire top story of that house and ten of Bashar’s men with her,” Cody said. “The only thing they found left of her was her skull and her spine lying in the front---”

  The sound of a crash, bright and glassy, caught Cody’s attention. He jerked on the cuffs, pulling Jose over onto the ground, dragging him back just as shards of glass came crashing down onto the sidewalk in a shower of glitter. He looked up. Fred was being dangled above the sidewalk by two men, each one holding onto one of his legs.

  “Serves him right,” Cody said. “He and that Chamber of Commerce wanted cheap labor, asked for a thousand Syrians, and that was that. I told ‘em, didn’t I? I warned ‘em.”

  Jose struggled to his feet. “Let’s just go, man. I don’t wanna to see this!”

  “Well, what do you know?” Cody said. He took out his keyring and removed the cuff on Jose’s wrist and then from his own.

  Jose started for the door to the café. Cody grabbed his arm and swung him around. Jose looked up. Bashar’s men were pulling Fred back through the window.

  “I ain’t never seen that before,” Jose said with relief.

  “So, Fred finds himself caught in the middle of something,” Cody said. “Bashar must want him alive.”

  “You know Bashar – go ask him,” Jose said.

  Cody grinned sardonically and said, “I couldn’t care less about what he does with Fred.”

  “Let’s just go,” Jose said, “Or they’ll beat the hell out of us, too.”

  “Give it a minute.”

  Cody could hear Bashar’s men tripping down the hollow, wooden steps from the second floor of the Greenspan building. A second later, there came a crash: someone had just swung the two front doors open against their hinges. Two of Bashar’s men, with their unusual rifles slung over their shoulders, and with Fred between them, stepped out onto the sidewalk, dragging Fred with them. They loaded him into the back of the Fed Ex van.

  “Looks like Fred got two of those bastards,” Jose said.

  “Three,” Cody said, smiling. “And that means there are some nice guns up there somewhere.”

  “We’ve got a few minutes before the meat wagon pulls up,” Jose said, his eyes alight with the fire of probable profit. “You wanna go through the front door or through the basement tunnel?”

  { 5 }

  They waded through the algae-filled water, Tracy Graham and her men moving silently through the river with the water up to their necks. Tracy had led them to an old waste water drain emptying into Stones River just behind the Golf Course Camp. Raw sewage, fresh and powerful, made their heads reel. She’d canoed here as a child.

  “Now, I want you to have an open mind,” General Williams had told her two days earlier at her 0530 briefing. She’d just stood there at attention and listened, staring straight passed him while trying to keep her tired eyes from rolling into the back of her head. By 0535, she’d heard enough to shock her into wakefulness. “I’m sorry, Tracy – but there’s nobody else who can make this work.”

  “And I’m supposed to marry this guy, Zafar Katila?” she’d asked him, while she shook her head.

  “He’s got a wife and kids back in Valdosta, he’s a devout Christian, and he knows his business and ours,” General Williams had told her. “You’ll have free reign of the town – at least as long as Bashar’s in control. How long that will be, I don’t know. But you need to tell Zafar what to look for, get the information he gives you to our guy, and play the part of the---”

  “I know, I know – the faithful wife,” Tracy had said.

  One of Tracy’s men found a tree branch stuck into the bank with a piece of red fabric hanging from it. He motioned for the recon team to stop, and he waded over to Tracy, telling her they had reached the position. They were on time. 1130 hours. Everybody, including probably the guards, would be downshifting, either eating or sleeping.

  “I’ve got it from here,” Tracy whispered, as she climbed up onto a pile of limestone rocks. The team, who remained in the water, fanned out along the river’s rocky edge and watched the bank. Tracy quickly changed into a pair of old, worn out jeans and a dirty tee shirt, and handed all of her gear back down to a team member. The only thing she kept was a silenced Glock 33, a .357 semiautomatic pistol wrapped and sealed in a waterproof plastic bag. She nodded at the man closest to her, and the team quickly vanished into the darkness, leaving nothing but a swirl on the surface of the river. So far, so good: they had not been ambushed.

  Tracy had an uncomfortable feeling coming back to the Old Fort Golf Course. She’d learned to play golf here, and she had too many memories of the place – all of which haunted her dreams like ghosts, because all of the people she remembered from this place were ghosts.

  The finger-shaped isthmus, now a camp that held women, girls, and small boys, began as a fortress and supply depot for Federal Troops following the defeat of General Bragg’s Confederate Army in the winter of 1863. Then it became a golf course and a park, then it was transformed only recently into a prison camp.

  If Americans living south of Tennessee could hardly understand the mindset and culture of Islam, what they heard about Golf Course Camp, information they gleaned from captured Muslim soldiers and a few escapees, was incomprehensible. A specially-organized unit, one that travelled in the rear of ISA combat troops, took control of captured towns and cities minutes after the last shots had been fired. With the help of dogs, any remaining civilians, whether man, woman, or child, were rounded up, separated according to age and sex, and graded. Men and women over the age of fifty, and children under the age of five, were summarily executed by beheading. Able-bodied men were marched off to work and certain death. Young boys, girls, and beautiful women, regardless of their ages, were sent to Golf Course Camp where they went up for auction.

  Rumors of atrocities taking place at Golf Course Camp had caused considerable alarm in the south and in the west, though Tracy Graham gave little credence to the idea that new arrivals, when first captured, were strung together by a single strand of hundred-pound test fishing line with hooks through their noses and marched into the compound. But one thing did worry her. One report suggested the camp was guarded by older American women. These were women who wouldn’t bring a silver dime in an Islamic brothel filled with drunk Muslims. They were women who had converted from Christianity to Islam only to save themselves from execution.

  Climbing up the rocky bank, holding onto exposed tree roots, Tracy got her first sight of Golf Course Camp. She panned her eyes from the left to the right in moonlit darkness, taking it all in with a single sweep of her head. Oil lamps – a necessity in modern America following ISA’s use of EMP weapons to destroy the electrical grid and every solitary item that depended on electricity – dotted the camp from one end to the other. Long wooden shacks, probably engineered and built by ISA captives, ran along the inside of the fence not twenty feet from where she knelt. A guard carrying a lamp walked along the fence fifty yards to her left, moving away from her. She saw another on the right.

  “Any day now, darling, or are you going to sit there all night long?” A soft, pleasant voice said.

  Tracy froze in place, not moving a muscle, not batting an eyelash. She cut her eyes slowly to the right, seeing nothing. Somebody must have been standing on the other side of a small, bushy shrub. “Aqua Velva,” she whispered, waiting for the counter password.

  “If only,” the woman replied, answering her challenge correctly. “These Muslims sure could use it. They smell so bad I could faint – but I haven’t had a bath in two weeks, so---” The woman, dressed in a dark-colored Burka, stood up from behind the shrub, took a few steps, and knelt down beside a wooden fence post. She pulled back the square mesh wire – how it was fastened to the post, Tracy couldn’t tell – and Tracy slipped into the compound.

  Tracy handed the woman the plastic-wrapped Glock 33. “There’s an extra clip in there –
you’ve got nine rounds in each clip and one in the chamber. Nineteen total shots – make them count.”

  The woman gave Tracy the once-over and nodded. Her manner seemed disinterested and hostile. “I’ll make them count,” the woman said. “You just do what I tell you if you want to live past tonight.” She reached into her pocket, pulled something out, probably a small stone, and threw it against the wall of the nearest shack.

  A woman, tall, with a shaven head, came quickly from around the side of the shack. She carried a small satchel with her, and she was dressed in dark jeans and a white tee shirt. Without a word, she slipped through the fence and disappeared down to the river bank.

  “If it’s that easy, why don’t you all just leave?” Tracy said.

  “You really don’t have a clue, do you? If anybody disappears from my section, I get killed. If there’s an extra girl in the morning, I get killed. That’s all I’m going to say to you now except to tell you that you are now Susan Reid. Once you get settled into your bed, don’t look at or speak to anyone. Let’s go.”

  The woman looked up and down the long fencerow and, convinced no other guards were close by, she grabbed Tracy by the arm and pulled her along behind her. She hurried towards the shack nearest them, stopping at the corner of the building. She leaned her head forward and scanned the part of the camp known as The Yard, the grassy assembly area between the shacks. She turned to Tracy and said, “Give it a minute.”

  Tracy knelt down and looked around the corner of the roughly built shack, squinting into the dimly lit compound. Less than two years old, the camp looked like a ruins. Even up here, the hot, humid air reeked of human filth and sweat. She saw two men. One large, heavy-set man with an AK-47 slung across his back, and one skinny guy without a weapon, limping as he walked. They were crossing The Yard at the far end, near the shacks opposite them. “What’s . . . what’s up with those two guys?”

  “Booty call,” the woman said. “Just be glad you’re in section C, where they keep all the ugly chicks.”