The Last Infidel Page 4

  The woman didn’t move, and both she and Tracy kept their eyes focused on the center of The Yard, not moving a muscle, not daring to breathe.

  Tracy hadn’t looked forward to this part of her mission, and she was surprised at how quickly she became fearful for her own life. The urge to grab the weapon she’d given the woman, shoot the two guards, and bolt back the way she’d come seemed like the only reasonable thing to do. But she reminded herself she’d be here for only a day. Two at the most. Zafar Katila would get word of her arrival in just a few short hours – or maybe he already knew she’d arrived – and he would send for her. Tracy closed her eyes for a moment, then she opened them.

  As she looked out across the camp, trying her best to shut it all out, Tracy suddenly felt herself in the middle of the war in way she had never felt before. She wasn’t at a desk or on a “safe” recon mission, but right in the middle of the crap, right in among those who needed her most: the vulnerable, the powerless, the endangered. Then it hit her. Armed soldiers had a chance. They might die once in combat, die horribly of wounds they’d received on the field of battle; but the unarmed women and young children in this camp, in the hands of the Islamists, would die every day and live to remember it.

  Tracy felt the woman grab her shoulder. She watched as the two men disappeared into a shack on the far right of The Yard. Then she heard women screaming, high-pitched and terrible; and she felt the woman digging her nails into her bicep.

  “Now,” the woman said. “Follow me.”

  Tracy, energized by her fear, bucked up with a renewed sense of urgency and mission, bolted into an upright position.

  The woman led Tracy around the side of the shack and towards the front door. Up the rickety, wooden steps they hurried. With one hand, the woman threw open the door and, with the other, she pushed Tracy across the threshold.

  Right into the face of the camp commander.

  { 6 }

  Shaheed Abad, the camp overseer, was a dark-skinned, six-foot-tall, balding Islamist wearing a pair of designer jeans too snuggly and a yellow silk shirt printed garishly with palm trees and coconuts. He wound up his hand-cranked halogen flashlight, flipped it on, and shined it right into Tracy’s eyes.

  The woman looked at Tracy, and with lightning speed, grabbed her by the back of her shirt and threw her against the door jamb. Shaheed just shook his head. The woman began to speak, but Shaheed waived for her to keep her mouth shut, acting like a magician trying to make a scantily-clad woman disappear. She let go of Tracy and looked down at the ground.

  Tracy never took her eyes off Shaheed, mesmerized by the profound evil she saw – or maybe she’d just imagined it – and unaware of the consequences of maintaining direct eye contact with any Islamist. She held his gaze for the next few seconds. Had she wanted to do so, and she’d thought about it, she could have incapacitated him where he stood and then slowly killed him. A fitting end, she thought, for such a half-life posing as a man.

  “I am looking for Susan Reid,” Shaheed said. “And since no one in this barracks answers to that name, Mrs. Julia Parker, I assume this woman is Susan.”

  A sudden coldness hit Tracy, and she stiffened even more. She cut her eyes over to the burka-clad woman. Julia Parker? Not the same Julia Parker of Mt. Zion Baptist church, the wife of Jason Parker, the preacher. Her old high school Bible class teacher, a woman of conviction and compassion, and only ten years older than she was, could never have joined the ranks of Islam. She’d been Islam’s loudest opponent a few years earlier when the Muslim community tried to build a mosque south of town. And it was because of her efforts the construction was stopped.

  “She was trying to escape,” Mrs. Parker said, softly and passively. “I hope to please you, my master, and protect what is yours.”

  Shaheed slowly lifted his right hand. Tracy saw it holding a coiled whip of dark brown, leather. He put the coil under the chin of Mrs. Parker and gently lifted her head. Then he said, “Tomorrow, before breakfast, you will remind Miss Reid, and the rest of the ladies in the camp, about Islam, about submission, won’t you?”

  Mrs. Parker nodded vigorously, her eyes never once looking up.

  “Now, you will take Miss Reid to my office, like you do the others,” Shaheed said. “You know how I like them,” Shaheed said, cutting his eyes over to Tracy. “Am I clear?”

  Mrs. Parker hadn’t stopped nodding since she’d felt the whip beneath her chin.

  “And when you are done whipping Miss Reid in the morning, you will take her place, and she will be revenged for what you have done to her.”

  Tracy’s lips trembled; and she could feel her face tingle as – she was sure – it turned ashen white. She felt panic setting in, recognized it for what it was, and focused on breathing steadily and slowly. She tried counting every breath, something her training had taught her to do when under stress. But the more she tried to distract herself, the more she zeroed in on what the camp overseer said was about to happen to her.

  Her insertion into the barracks was supposed to be the easiest part of her mission. Now, instead of sleeping with the other prisoners, itself a harrowing undertaking, she would be taken to Shaheed Abad’s office where she would be presented to him the way he liked for women to be presented to him. No doubt this son of Satan saw her as a spoil of war to be spoiled.

  Shaheed took his whip and motioned towards the door and nodded. “Go now,” he said. “And do not let me find you where you are not supposed to be. Hut, hut, hut! Like it was yesterday!”

  Mrs. Parker grabbed Tracy’s arm, swung her around, and pushed her out through the door. Tracy lost her footing and stumbled down the steps, landing on the dusty, bare ground. She picked herself up, unhurt, and gave Mrs. Parker a strong, hard eye as she came down the steps. Shaheed, still standing near the threshold, looked down at Tracy and laughed.

  Tracy managed to hold herself together, physically and emotionally, as Mrs. Parker pushed her along, slapping the back of her head with an open palm. She saw three shacks at the far end of The Yard, all of them exact replicas of the poorly-designed, shoddily-built prisoners’ barracks. Lights, probably from incandescent bulbs powered by gasoline-powered generators, lit the porches and glowed behind glass windows. A few Muslims, all wearing matching fatigues and holding their weapons, sat on the porches. They laughed and ate while a couple of women served them.

  Mrs. Parker headed towards the shack in the center. At her signal, the men on the porch stopped eating, jumped up, and hurried down the steps, disappearing into the shadows. The others, still seated on the porches to the right and left, just stared and pointed.

  “Seems like they’re afraid of you,” Tracy said. She started up the steps and hesitated when she felt the first step flexing beneath her foot like the floor of an inflatable bounce house. Typical Muslim construction, she thought: shoddy, cheap, and inferior.

  Tracy felt another blow on the back of her head, harder than the ones she’d already received, and she lost her balance, falling forward on the steps, breaking her fall with her hands. She turned around to get up, and Mrs. Parker, as well-trained as any prize fighter, drove her fist into Tracy’s face as if aiming for the back of her skull. She felt her head fly backwards and hit the steps.

  Mrs. Parker put her face close to Tracy’s and whispered through her clenched teeth, “Get up, b----, before I smash your head into a million pieces.”

  Nobody not within a few inches of Shaheed’s rickety, poorly-built steps could’ve heard the things she had just been told by Mrs. Parker. Tracy’s being pushed down the steps a few minutes earlier, and the blows to the back of her head, were all part of an act, things her old Bible School teacher did to keep up the illusion of her conversion to Islam and her support for her boss. Tracy believed that a minute earlier. Now, she wasn’t quite sure.

  Mrs. Parker pulled Tracy to her feet using the neck of her tee shirt as a handle. She told her to get moving.

  Tracy could see Mrs. Parker’s eyes through the opening in her b
urka, eyes cold and angry, dark and obsessed with the job assigned to her. In a fit of brazen defiance, Tracy let out a bit of nervous laughter, a cackling sound of independence and defiance, and she walked up the rickety wooden steps holding onto an equally rickety handrail.

  She thought about Mrs. Parker. Islam had dismantled her, had broken the woman she once knew, a woman who had once been a significant person in her own life and in the lives of so many others, most of whom had probably come to rather untimely and inhumane deaths.

  Mrs. Parker opened the door to Shaheed’s shack and motioned towards a hallway on the left. The inside of the shack looked worse than the outside and smelled three times as bad. A couple of bags of trash, redolently sweet and probably filled with a week’s worth of refuse, racked Tracy’s sense of smell. Dirty clothes and empty soda cans littered the floor. Pornographic pictures, all of them looking like they’d been printed off a cheap, color printer, papered the walls at eye level.

  Tracy, walking in front of Mrs. Parker, was shown through the first door to the right.

  “Take off your clothes,” Mrs. Parker said.

  “Like . . . like hell I will,” Tracy shot back.

  “Hell is what you’ll get if you don’t.”

  “You taught me just the opposite a few years ago in Bible Class, if I remember correctly.”

  “Take them off now, or call the help,” Mrs. Parker said. “And you won’t want the help, if you get my meaning.” She reached into a pocket of her Burka and pulled out a whistle.

  “And how about if I tell Shaheed about the gun I gave you?”

  Mrs. Parker raised the whistle to her lips.

  Tracy relented. After she had removed her clothes, Mrs. Parker told her to lay down on the mattress. Tracy’s wrists were bound with handcuffs to the headboard and, with her legs spread apart, had her ankles bound to the foot board.

  Mrs. Parker, probably out of a sense of duty, or maybe because she needed some credit with God, however small, said, “He won’t take you – he knows Zafar owns you. He’s just trying to humiliate you.” She turned on her heels and beat a path down the hall, though the front door, and back to the other side of hell.

  { 7 }

  After his small breakfast of biscuits and honey, Cody Marshall stepped out his Ford F-150 onto rough, uneven gravel and looked at the mosque he and his crew had been working on for the last three years. The workers, never eager to start the day, milled around the worksite waiting for their work assignments, and Jose was just stepping out of the construction trailer. The Muslim guards, ten men, all of them armed, stood off to the side laughing and carrying on in Arabic, a language Jose referred to as Towelese.

  Cody hated Islam, hated this place, and hated the mosque. Imposing and oppressive, three stories high, ostentatious with its large, central rotunda and four skyscraping minarets surrounding it, the mosque dominated the landscape distastefully. And across the street, broken sections of brick walls, once part of Murfreesboro’s finest hangouts – Tom’s Bar, Nebo’s Hero, and Pizza Perfect – protruded from the ground like the few remaining teeth from the jawbone of a grinning, dried out skull. Piles of metal, rusty, twisted and bent, and stacks of weathered lumber, some of it salvageable, ran in one continuous heap from Greenland Drive to Middle Tennessee Boulevard, little more than half a mile away. And then the odor of the trash dumps not far to the east, ripe and festering, like the gas from an out-of-date, spray-on whipped crème of sorts, cast an invisible, soul-shredding, heart-breaking shroud on everyone and everything.

  A gust of wind swept across the packed gravel drive, sending a fine dust up into the air and straight into Cody’s eyes. At least the breeze momentarily pushed back the reek boiling up from the dump. He rubbed his eyes and hurried towards the construction trailer. Jose saw him and hurried towards him.

  Cody glanced towards the large front doors of the mosque. He saw them swinging open, and he stopped. Four Muslims stepped out. Two official-looking men, both wearing fine black suits, started arguing in Arabic. Another man, tall and apparently without any interest in the other two, walked off to be by himself, rolling a cigarette. The fourth, a man named Jadhari, smaller than all the rest, wearing tight jeans, a designer tee shirt, and a pair of black and white Converse, put his hands on his hips and looked at Cody, shaking his head.

  When it came to Muslims and what they wanted, one could never tell. But right now, Cody couldn’t have cared less. And why was Jose coming towards him in such a hurry? he wondered, as he waited for his friend to cross the rocky, torn, potholed, uneven ground. He looked at him twice, noticing Jose had that overly-perturbed look splashed across his Latino face; and now he would have to listen to him ramble on in Spanglish, wait for him to correct and clarify himself, find the right words, and then hear him swear that things were worse than they actually were.

  Cody pulled his cap down and walked to meet him. He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, turned him around in the direction from which he’d come, and just kept on walking towards the construction trailer. “What’s the problem today?”

  “Jadhari’s on the warpath again,” Jose said, his nerves jumping and his voice high and worried. “He says the mosque won’t be finished by the deadline.”

  Jadhari, the twenty-seven-year-old chief of the local police with direct, anytime-access to Bashar himself, a locally raised Muslim whom Cody had taken under his wing in junior high school, was Cody’s boss.

  “And?” Cody asked, his voice calm and deliberately detached.

  “And those two other men – the ones arguing – they’ve been snooping around the mosque,” Jose said. “I just know they’re going to find all that stuff we did. If they remove any of the sheetrock, they’re gonna---”

  “You worry too much,” Cody snapped back. “But you’re right – they’ll crap bricks.”

  “You know, they will kill us – and they’ll kill us slowly with one of those dull knives of theirs.”

  Cody walked up to the construction trailer, ignoring Jadhari, who had only moments earlier given Cody the “get-your-sorry-infidel-butt-over-here” look, and opened the door. He stepped inside with Jose right behind him, walked over to his desk, and picked up the job assignments book. Jose was right, he thought. Every stud, joist, and support in the mosque, prior to being covered with sheetrock and stone, had been inscribed with verses attesting to the eternal truth of the deity of Christ. The Christians on the work crews, all of them devout, God-fearing men, made it a point to not blaspheme Islam’s book or prophet, so they were adamant that no blasphemy against Islam be written on the structure. But if the Muslims discovered the graffiti, there’d be Satan to pay.

  “They’ll kill you slowly, Jose,” Cody said. “Me they’ll kill quickly. But don’t worry. If Jadhari is convinced the building won’t be ready by July fifth, then the last thing he’s going to do is let anyone take anything apart.”

  “You don’t even care anymore, do you?” Jose asked. “You know, I want to get out of here – and the longer I stay, the less chance I have---”

  “What did you do with the guns we stole at Fred’s?”

  “Alright, alright,” Jose said aggressively, as he moved towards the door and looked out. “Here comes that son-of-a-bitch Jadhari.” He snapped the door shut and nodded towards the wall. “They’re in the wall near the floor beside your desk, where you keep everything else. All of the bullets are there, too.”

  “Just making sure you haven’t stolen them,” Cody said.

  “I would never do that to you.”

  “Like hell you wouldn’t.” Cody stood up, drained the day-old water out of an old, plastic Pepsi cup, and turned just as Jadhari swung open the door.

  Jadhari, his dark eyes full of squint and suspicion, a look more ludicrous than threatening, gently pushed Jose out of his way and stepped up to Cody and offered his hand. A short silence followed, neither man speaking, each playing a game of social chicken, daring the other to speak first.

  Cody said not a word, but no
dded, saluting Jadhari with the red Pepsi cup as if he were offering a toast to his old, childhood friend.

  Without taking his eyes off Cody, Jadhari asked Jose to leave and told him he needed a few minutes alone with his subordinate. Jose nodded apologetically, as if he’d been the one to interrupt their meeting, and quickly left.

  Jadhari reached into the back pocket of his jeans and removed a small, metal flask. He removed the lid, raised the opened container to his face, and breathed deeply. He handed it to Cody. “You want out of here, don’t you, my old friend? You might as well say it.”

  “I don’t hate you, Jadhari – and I don’t love you, either,” Cody said. “And, frankly, I don’t give a crap what happens to me or anyone else.”

  “I know, I know,” Jadhari said crisply. “It’s those dirty Democrats and their filthy president – those are the ones you hate.”

  “They get what they deserve.”

  “But you don’t,” Jadhari said, as he walked over to a window and swung the long, dingy-white curtains back. He looked out across the worksite and stared at the mosque. The he turned and looked at Cody. “You’re still alive because of me.”

  “I’ve never once denied that.”

  “Justin Kovacs, Billy Grebels – that sorry Jew – they’re all dead now, aren’t they?” Jadhari said, waving his hand in the air, shooing away the names he’d just uttered like they were bothersome ghosts.

  Cody nodded his head slowly and said, “And your old friends along with them, or have you forgotten Elissa Jamison – raped to death by your men? She once saved you from – who was it? – oh yeah, that bully at school, what’s his name? Tony Barton? And you just cowered behind her while he beat the hell out of her. And what about Gus Wharton? Wasn’t he the guy who helped you---?”

  Jadhari picked up Cody’s old, battered office chair and threw it towards the far end of the trailer. He clenched his fists and howled in rage.