Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Fighting over me. I should be flattered.” Jack laughed. “Zarqawi wants the honor of cutting off my head. I nearly shot him less than a year ago, you know?”

“Why didn’t you!” Giti said. “Our sister Lina would be alive. Zarqawi raped her, then shot her in the head with his pistol while he ejaculated inside her.”

“Such a hero,” Jack exclaimed. “I won’t miss with my next shot. I’m Killing Abu Omar, then Zarqawi. That’s a promise.”

“I do not like talk of killing,” Giti said.

“Get used to it, kiddo. It surrounds us,” Jack said.

Giti shuddered and shook her head.

“So with Omar gone, that leaves who in charge here?” Jack asked, hopeful, feeling energy from the two dates.

“I suspect that Abu Omar will take most of his men with him to al-Rawa,” she said. “He will not meet the lion without a means of killing him. But he will not leave you attended lightly, either.”

“I’m hardly a threat locked in here,” Jack said, pondering the what-ifs. “He’ll post some good men here to make sure I don’t pull anything funny. Put someone in charge who he trusts.”

“That is what I believe, too,” Giti said, then she smiled. “He will not anticipate the four little lambs of his harem fighting back, however. That is our advantage.”

“Smart.” Jack smiled. “You should join the Marines. I could use a wise apple like you.”

“Wise apple?” she frowned. “Is that good?”

“Very good,” Jack said.

Several of Abu Omar’s gunmen sat on rocks beneath a grove of date palms that grew a hundred feet in front of the house. Their roots tapped into the water supply that also fed the well in the downstairs chamber and ran a trickle into stone troughs built in the midst of the trees, tamarack, and salt grass that lived off the overflow for the animals.

The men ate the sugary confection harvested from the trees and drank tea as they waited for Abu Omar to get mounted and depart for al-Rawa. Along the way, they would stop at two other similar oases, pick up more gunmen in Toyota and Nissan four-by-four war trucks.

Abu Omar preferred to drive his truck, a new blue one with big off-road tires, nerf bars, and matching chrome-pipe headache rack. Two Russian-made Kalashnikov PKMS machine guns gleamed on top, mounted at each corner above the cab.

When he stepped through the door, his men stopped talking and looked at their leader, amazed.

No longer did he wear the baggy clothes of an Iraqi peasant, with a scuffed pistol belt and bare sword stuck in it, but he had bathed, and even trimmed his beard short. He wore green military riding trousers and polished brown cavalry boots, laced at the top, up nearly to his knees. His breeches’ legs were pegged tight inside the boots. On his waist he had tied a red-and-black sash with braided fringe ends that draped down his leg. No longer wearing his shoulder rig, a brown leather Sam Browne held his Makarov 9-by-18-millimeter PMM, packed in a polished brown-leather holster with a flap buttoned over the top. Matching leather magazine pouches rode next to it.

On the opposite side of the gun belt, Omar wore his ornate short Moorish ceremonial sword in a black-silk-covered scabbard. He wore red-velvet wraps with rank insignia of field marshal, a circle of five gold stars surrounding a winged Iraqi lion, a design of his own making, mounted on his brown uniform shirt’s epaulets.

Crowning his head and tied behind his shoulders, Abu Omar wore a fine white-silk-and-wool-embroidered royal keffiyeh with a gold-and-red-braided agal making four rope circles around the headdress, and from it four long red-and-black-silk cords tipped with fringed tassels hanging down his back.

As he spoke, he slapped his leg with a black-leather riding crop.

“Today, our army of Helpers of the Sunnah will claim command of all Iraq governance states,” he said. “Today is our day of honor.

“I intend to halt with blood the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi once and for all. His dwindling forces, most of whom have already defected to our ranks, can join us or die with him today.”

A long silence fell over the men. They didn’t know if their leader had lost his mind, or if he truly had decided that their Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah army now stood ready to dominate al-Qaeda Iraq.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” shouted Yasir al-Bayati, and he began firing his AK rifle in the air.

That woke them up.

The men standing under the date palms raised their rifles skyward and fired them, too.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” they began shouting, and soon the place had erupted to shouting and shooting.

Even underground, in the dungeon, Jack heard the shooting and hoped that the place had fallen under attack.

Abu Omar raised his hands, and the men cheered.

“Now, mount up,” he yelled to them.

“Should I drive or will you?” Yasir asked his commander to go, too.

“My most trusted captain, Yasir Sayf al-Bayati,” Abu Omar told the old goatherd. “You must remain here, in command of six men to guard our prisoner. Zarqawi may send men to steal him, so I put you in charge of my best men.”

“You think he would come here?” Yasir asked, now frightened at the idea of standing off a swarm of al-Qaeda with just six men. Even the six best would never match a force of any size. Besides, Yasir had never killed a man. Not even fired a gun at another human being.

“It is very unlikely, to be truthful, my friend,” he said, putting his arm over Yasir’s shoulders. “Yet it could happen. I anticipate that he will try to kill me in al-Rawa, hoping to turn my forces to his command. However, he fools himself to believe that Iraqi faithful will follow some Palestinian from Jordan posing as a kaliph of the Sunnah. I have it on good authority that his father is Shiite and his mother a bloody Catholic.”

“Very good, sir,” Yasir said, bowing his head low to his master with a courtly salute of fingers touching his forehead, saying, “ Adab ,” showing his respect but feeling rejected once again.

“Mind the women,” Omar said, looking at the four girls standing politely in a line behind Yasir. And to them he asked, “Am I not handsome today?”

All four girls bowed and curtsied to him.

As Giti stood back straight and forced a smile to Abu Omar, he looked at her more closely.

“Giti, you appear rosy today, almost blooming,” the washed and pressed man still with brown teeth said, smiling. “And it appears that you’ve grown around your belly. Are you with child, daughter?”

“Oh, Abu Omar, master,” she said, curtsying and bowing her head. “My glow comes from your magnificence today. I assure you, I am not with child. I know how that would distress you. A peasant slave girl with your child. It is my unclean time. That is all. I swell and bloat. I am having these horrid cramps!”

“No, no, no, no!” Abu Omar shouted, putting his hand out, in front of his face. “Do not speak of such things in my presence! Do not disgust me with talk of a woman and her unclean period. I forbid it!”

“Go inside! Never speak of such things to men! You have work!” Yasir scolded, and sent all four girls indoors. Then he apologized to his master. “Sir, she is a Christian, unaware of morality and decency. They walk among men with their heads uncovered, and their bare legs showing.”

“Teach them to know better, Yasir,” Omar said, and walked to his truck. He motioned to the gunman sitting behind the steering wheel to get out and go to the other side. “I shall drive.”

Then, as he stepped in the cab, he stood on the side-bar step, and shouted to his men, “Follow me!”

A white Chinese-manufactured King Long nine-passenger minivan with dark-tinted back windows drove up the highway past Samarrah, on its way through Tikrit. If all seemed well at that point, it would turn onto Highway 19 just outside Baiji and cut across west to Haditha, then around to Rawa. If things did not appear safe that route, they would take the long ride, up to Mosul, across through Tel Afar, and then back south to Qa’im, and from there to Rawa. Five hundred miles rather than two hundred fifty.