John Ringo - Ghost

Jamid Halal stepped passed the two teenage mujahideen, pushed aside a flap of rotting canvas and ducked to enter the low doorway. The room beyond was small, no more than three meters on a side, dark and dirty with a litter-strewn, packed-clay floor and granite walls covered in Arabic graffiti. The only light was from the doorway, blocked by the canvas and his body, and a small paneless window on the south wall. Despite the size, five heavily armed mujahideen were packed along the sides leaving only a narrow spot in the middle. In this narrow spot a tall, spare, figure squatted behind a low table, typing on a laptop computer.

“Great One,” Halal said, dropping to both knees and bowing his head. “It is good to see that you truly survive!”

“Did you believe that Allah would permit the forces of the Great Satan to kill his most valiant leader?” the man said, soberly, his piercing eyes meeting those of Jalal with a real question behind them.

Halal recognized what the question implied. Only true belief could bring about the Final Jihad and the destruction of the Dar Al Harb. Questioning the survival of the Great One, surely Allah’s most important sword in the battle against the Dar Al Harb, implied a lack of faith in Allah Himself. And the slightest trace of lack of belief, in this place, in this man’s presence, could lead to immediate martyrdom. Halal bowed his head and nodded in submission.

“Great One, my faith has been tried by the events of the last two years,” the mujahideen commander admitted. “We battle the Great Satan daily and yet our numbers dwindle. Again and again the mujahideen fearlessly attack them as we are instructed in the Words of the Prophet. To put aside fear of death and think only of the Will of Allah. Of the Glory of Paradise and the spread of the Dar Al Islam. And, again and again, we are not only defeated, but destroyed. Their technology, their training… their faith in their false Gods, seems to be beyond even the Will of Allah to defeat. But, your presence fills me with renewed hope. If you can survive when all their forces search for you, anything is possible. Forgive me my trial of faith and look upon my actions. I have sought battle without fail. As Allah is Merciful, have mercy upon his true servant.”

“Very pretty,” the tall man said. “And very common. Everywhere I go, the faith of the mujahideen is tried. And, everywhere I go, they profess renewed faith. It is with these weak tools that Allah’s Will must be worked. But, Halal, the Jihad has need of you. You have skills that are needed in a great mission. We still can bring the Great Satan to its knees and teach the Lesser Satans of Europe and Asia that Allah’s Will is great and powerful beyond even that of Satan. And you will be the tool that shall show that will. In one stroke, we will break the will of the Dar Al Harb, which is divided even in the lands of the Great Satan, and bring the banners of Islam, once again, to the lost Da Al Islam. And all the jihad needs is your skills.”

“I live in submission to Allah,” Halal said, nodding. “What is the mission, Great One?”

“We shall strike at the Satan’s greatest weakness,” the tall man said, his eyes lidding heavily. “The love of its whores.”

Mike Harmon stuck his laptop in his jump bag and tossed the latter over one shoulder, standing up and stretching his back. He had been sitting in the coffee shop for nearly three hours and he wasn’t as young as he used to be. Fifteen years in the teams had left him with degenerative damage in half the major joints in his body and a back that was compacted enough for a fifty-year-old.

As he wandered out of the shop, he glanced at his image in the plate glass window and grimaced. Brown hair, brown eyes, a “regular” face, neither handsome nor ugly, shoulders a bit wider than the norm, middle beginning to bulge a bit despite regular exercise. Not the most prepossessing figure and certainly not, by any stretch of the imagination, a big man on campus.

He’d thought that going back to college would be a cinch. With both his career and his marriage foundered on the rocks, time to go find some time in the sun. After years of eighteen-hour days, how hard could homework be? And then there were the lovely young coeds, long legs flashing by, skirts swirling and flirting, practically begging to be snapped up by a not particularly bad looking former SEAL.

Well, the homework wasn’t actually that bad, or it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the classes he had to take. History. How bad could it be? Greeks and Romans and Persians and the Renaissance. Egyptians and feudal lords and maybe memorizing a bunch of dead guys’ names.

Little did he know. That was “old history.” His current major course was “An Introduction to African Pre-Colonial History.” As far as he’d been able to determine, his definition of what constituted “history” and the definition used by the University of Georgia History Department didn’t come from the same dictionary. Sure, the old time historians made stuff up. Livy read like something written by Tom Clancy and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars was written with political image in mind with only brief touches on reality, something like a Democratic stump speech. But it had brief touches on reality and it was at least written . Prior to the “colonization” period, Africa had no writing and, apparently, no problems worth discussing. His professor attributed every ill of Africa to the colonialism of the White Man, ignoring the ongoing tribal wars that dated back thousands of years, not to mention the Arab slave traders that benefited from them. He’d had to see the first episode of the mini-series Roots and had been loudly shushed when he started laughing in the first fifteen minutes. Slave traders didn’t get off their boats and go chase bush-bunnies around. They bought them from Arabs, not fucking “Islamics,” Ay-rabs . And the Arabs bought them from the tribes, who were constantly at war with each other.

Sometimes it was all Mike could do to not stand up and punch the stupid bastard, especially when he got started on “modern colonialism,” by which he meant the War on Terrorism. Mike wanted to scream “Have you ever been in Mogadishu you ignorant son-of-a-bitch?” Hell, the conditions in Africa were better when the English and the Germans and even the French and the Belgians had been in charge. He’d read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness a couple of times during down time on the teams. And he’d been in Congo, not that there was any trace of it going in or out. And Congo now was “Heart of Darkness” on fucking steroids. The only thing worse than having the Belgians in charge was having the fucking gomers handling things.

But, of course, the problem with the gomers wasn’t that they were totally fucked up gomers. Oh, no, the problem with the gomers were all the fault of colonialism and “western military adventures.” Well, he’d been on one “western military adventure” in Congo and as far as he was concerned the best thing to do was spray the whole damned place with anthrax, including the fucking gorillas, shoot anyone that tried to leave and start over.

Attitudes like this, of course, didn’t sit very well with his professors. It also didn’t fit very well with the pretty little airheads that were being fed a steady diet of leftist propaganda bullshit. And no matter how he tried, he’d always end up opening up his mouth and pointing out that it was leftist propaganda bullshit. That the problem with the gomers was their fucking culture, which was totally fucked up and had been before colonialization and was going to stay that way until somebody beat some sense into their heads. At which point terms like “militarist” and “baby-killer” and, with the real intellectuals, “myrmidon” would start getting tossed around.