Ben Shapiro - True Allegiance

Brett scoffed. “And yours, I suppose, are meaningful. Slaughtering women and children.”

Ashammi grabbed Brett by his face, squeezing his jaw until it hurt. Brett clenched his teeth and stared into his eyes. “We will do anything for Allah. That is our strength, and your weakness.”

Brett whispered, “There you’re wrong. You don’t know me, and you don’t know my countrymen. We live for something. We live to kill bastards like you.”

Ashammi laughed. “No, that I know, General Hawthorne. At least those of you left.” He turned to his goons. “Take him to his cell.”

The men seized him by his arms, pulled him to his feet. As they dragged him out of the room, he got a glimpse through a window, just a crack: the Azadi Tower, growing from the ground like a thick-rooted tree, culminating in a latticework tower. Brett suppressed a grin of satisfaction. He knew exactly where he was from the coordinates on Feldkauf’s map. And he knew exactly what he had to do about it. And he’d heard Ashammi’s one word: “Tomorrow.”

He hoped his message would get to America in time.

They came for him in the middle of the night, the better to keep him off-balance. He’d been trained for such techniques, but too long ago to matter, and he’d awoken groggy, head pounding, nauseated by the casual beating handed out to him by one of Ashammi’s lackeys. No marks to the face, of course—they wanted their victims looking clean and fresh before they sawed off their heads. But the big bearded kid had worked his torso over pretty well, and ground the bones of his arm against one another to boot. Yusuf, he’d heard one of the others call him. He wouldn’t forget that anytime soon. Every time Yusuf had balled up his fist and driven it into his midsection, Brett had pictured cracking the lug across the head with a two-by-four.

They’d taken his uniform from him, forced him to dress in an orange jumpsuit, the uniform of their victims. When he’d gone to the bucket that served as a toilet, he’d noticed his urine had turned red. “Like Ali,” he’d thought to himself, “after the Thrilla.” But Ali had survived that.

This, Brett knew, he would not survive.

That wasn’t his plan.

He’d formed the plan after seeing the Azadi Tower, gauging the distance from it, realizing that Feldkauf had given him the exact coordinates of the site. He needed them to release one of their typical terror tapes for it to work, but he thought they’d do that—they couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t stop from parading him on all the news networks. That was their triumph. They wouldn’t win by fighting big battles, but by drawing recruits with the tapes.

He just hoped that the boys in intelligence picked up on the message he’d be sending. And he prayed that the film editor, or whatever cave dweller familiar with Windows Movie Maker they’d be using for this particular production, didn’t chop up the film too badly.

Yusuf and one of his companions laughed and joked as they kicked him awake, grabbed him by the arms, pulled him down the dark hallway. He could see fluorescent lights shining through the cracks of the door before he got there; a ray of light caught the edge of Ibrahim’s knife, which he carried on his belt. Yusuf looked down at him and, in his broken English, guffawed, “You be in movie now. Like movie star.”

Brett muttered through gritted teeth, “Fuck you and your mother.” Yusuf smiled. Brett smiled back. “Also, your goat,” he added.

The door at the end of the hallway swung open. Waiting before a green flag sat Ashammi, his face bared. Normally in these videos, Brett knew, the terrorists liked to swath their faces in black scarves to prevent identification. For the jihad video of a major American general, Ashammi wanted to take personal credit. Yusuf and his buddy deposited Brett next to Ashammi, on his knees.

“General,” said Ashammi, looking down at Brett, “I hope your accommodations were not too primitive. I must say, you look somewhat the worse for wear.”

“No,” said Brett, glancing at Yusuf. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Ah, ever the tough American. Well, the good news is that your suffering will not last much longer.”

“Yours either, I’d bet,” said Brett.

“But I will not suffer,” Ashammi said placidly. “Remember, I serve Allah, and no matter what happens, he will be with me.”

“I only hope he’s with all the different pieces of you after we nail your ass with a Hellfire missile.”

“Any plans I don’t know about, General?” Ashammi smiled.

Brett smiled back. “Maybe. Maybe not. You’ll find out soon enough.”

Ashammi took a long ceremonial dagger from his robes. “General, I’m sorry to have to get down to business. I’ve enjoyed our conversations. But I will admit that I will enjoy killing you more, given how much Muslim blood you have on your hands. Now, I am afraid we don’t have much time. Let me be perfectly clear. You will cooperate. If you say anything we do not wish you to say, I will personally cut off your testicles. If you do anything we do not wish you to do, I will cut off your testicles, and then I will slash your throat after letting you bleed.”

Brett grunted. “You make a convincing argument.”

“I have to admit, I am somewhat surprised at your reasonableness.”

“I’m already going to get killed, I assume. No reason to lose my balls in the bargain.”

“Very wise. All right, Hassan, record.”

A young man, no more than seventeen, hit the record button on the digital Canon. The red light flashed. Ashammi began to speak.

When the taping was all over, Ashammi thanked Brett for his cooperativeness. Then he offered him a copy of the Koran. Brett turned it down and told Ashammi to stuff it up his ass. Ashammi smiled, then gestured to his henchmen to take Brett back to his cell.

Brett lay back against the stone wall on his thin mattress, thinking of Ellen. He tried to remember her face, the softness of her eyes; he tried to recall the feel of her body, every line of it silhouetted. He found himself crying. For himself, just a bit. Mostly for her. For the child they had never been able to have.

Then, slowly, he did something he had not done for years: he got down on his knees and he prayed.

“Dear Lord,” he whispered to the darkness, thick with the stench of feces and urine, oppressive with the smell of sweat, “I know I haven’t spoken with You for a while. But I need you now. I may never forgive You for what you did to my Ellen, why You took our baby from us. They say You have a logic all Your own, and I reckon that’s the case, since I sure as hell can’t understand You or the things You do. I know I’ve tried to do the right thing as I see it, and I haven’t broken too many of the lessons I learned in Sunday school.

“And You know better than anybody that I’ve never been one for prayer. I always thought that some people treat You like a gumball machine, like if they pray just the right way and say just the right things, that You’ll give them what they want, when this whole world is about something bigger than what any of us want. It’s about what You want, and I do hope that I’ve done at least a few things the way You want them.

“But now I’m not praying for myself. I’m praying for Ellen. Because after this, she’s gonna be alone, Lord, and I just want her to be happy. You took her children away from her. Maybe I took myself away from her. But however it worked out, now she’ll be on her own. Please let her find someone else. Please let her be happy for once in her life. Please let my sweetheart go on with her life, let her understand what I’ve done and why I’ve done it. Thank You, Lord, in advance. Amen.”

Brett closed his eyes and dropped into an uneasy sleep.