state, Castilla, almost completely out of the war. He'd failed to knock Balboa out of the war. That rankled. Worse, they were hunting down and killing his men. And the damnable locals seemed to be helping them do it, which was worse.
Unfortunately, the supply of Kosmo hostages had dried up completely. There were no more Taurans willing to volunteer, nor had there been since that one woman, Giulia Masera, had been fed feet first into a wood chipper and a tape of the murder turned over to al Iskandaria News Network. Fadeel was still puzzling over what had caused al Iskandaria to broadcast the tape. After all, they'd been wise enough to refuse to show the death of one of Masera's countrymen when he had defied Fadeel just before his well-deserved execution. At the time, Fadeel had been rather angry at the television network for refusing the tape. On reflection, though, he had come to agree that showing a citizen of the crusader coalition dying bravely and well would have been damaging rather than helpful.
At that, it would not have been nearly as damaging as broadcasting the death of Masera. She had been emulsified from the bottom up, her mouth opening and closing like a fish stuck out of water as she sank feet first into the wood chipper, her reddened, lumpy remains spitting out the bottom. Fadeel had rather enjoyed the show, naturally, but even he had seen it was a dangerous move for whichever comradely organization had been responsible.
That was another puzzle. Fadeel didn't know and had not been able to find out who was responsible for that execution. He'd thought at first that it must have been one of his own cells, naturally under very loose control due to the circumstances of the fight for God in Sumer. Not one of his people, however, had been willing to admit to it. Nor had any of the ransom money shown up.
I could surely have used another twenty-five million Tauros in the fight against the crusaders.
Not everything was going against him, fortunately. He'd had a few bad moments there, when the satanic Federated States had introduced automatic explosive sniffers. A number of bombs and great quantities of bomb- making material had been lost to the cause of the righteous and the just that way. Then the local mercenaries had brought in dogs to hunt for and warn of bombs.
The solution had been both beautiful and elegant in its simplicity. Fadeel had set some hundreds of young boys with small spray bottles to randomly spraying wheel wells of automobiles and trucks with water with which minute quantities of powdered explosive had been mixed. When everything smelled of bomb then nothing smelled of bomb. The dogs and the operators of the sniffing machines had been driven half insane, Fadeel and his followers had had a few good laughs, and more than a few crusaders had been enticed into the range of actual bombs.
Now the dogs were used only for tracking and the sniffing machines sat uselessly in a warehouse somewhere in Babel. Better still, the flow of explosives continued as it had before the infidels had tried their clever tricks.
Thinking about that, about the machines sitting idle and useless, set Fadeel to laughing yet again.
He sobered immediately. It wasn't enough to make up for the fact that after Masera's grisly execution the weak crusader governments had refused to give any ransoms. More than three dozen kidnappings and executions without so much as a drachma changing hands was enough to convince him it was a losing game.
Fadeel supposed that the charge of bad faith, after the Masera butchery, was enough to shield those governments from the domestic fallout of not paying.
When the governments had a reasonable and obvious chance to get 'their' people back alive the pressure was tremendous. Now? Now nobody trusts us to deliver the goods.
Oh, yes, his people still went after the humanitarians and the journalists. The FSC even tried to stop them or rescue the peace-lovers in the other parts of the country. Here around Ninewa, for some reason, the Balboans generally didn't even make the attempt. And the other aid workers, the ones Fadeel thought might elicit a response from the mercenaries? Those were always too well guarded to even try.
Maybe they want me to kill off the ones I take. Something to think upon, anyway. Fadeel scratched his head in puzzlement. He was, at heart, a fairly simple man rather than a devious one. Grand strategy was Allah's job, not his. He was for fighting.
For that fighting he had a new recruit as well, though this particular recruit's time in the organization was destined to be short.
Ishmael Arguello, an earnest boy of seventeen, had taken the death of his mother hard. The younger of the two boys, and the handsomer if not the brighter, Ishmael had always been his mother's favorite. Moreover, Layla had been the center of Ishmael's universe. He had been cast adrift when Layla was cut down in cold blood. His father had been little help. No more so had his brother. School friends and teachers had been sympathetic, of course, and when one of the teachers had suggested continuing his mother's work Ishmael had decided that that was for him. The teacher had also, very considerately, put the boy in touch with a… recruiter, for lack of a better term. That was close enough.
The overhead fan turned slowly and quietly in Fadeel's basement office. He sat on a cushion on the floor, his legs crossed underneath him, feet pressed against thighs, while he continued to muse on his problems.
In some ways this enemy understands us very well, Fadeel thought, damn him. In other ways he is almost as ignorant as the rest of this crusader alliance. He knows, for example, that disadvantaging clans by killing some of their workers causes more discontent. Why he never followed through on that understanding to the logical conclusion that killing very large numbers of clan members would destroy his enemies and serve as a salutary lesson to other clans, I just don't understand. He knows, absolutely he knows, that we are a people who take revenge. Why he can't figure out that he should eliminate people who are sure to become enemies by reason of the blood of relations… well, it's just impossibly foolish.
I understand that in Taurus and the FSC, guilt and innocence are entirely individual matters because their people are individuals, individuals who can be encouraged and deterred by what happens to them, personally. But here, we are not individuals. No system of punishment can mean as much to us without a collective, blood-related, aspect.
Of course, some of the bastards do understand that. How many times have I had my men lost to the infidel because he rounded up twenty or so clansmen from clans sympathetic to the cause of Allah, tried them for crimes and threatened to hang them if information-oh, and captures, of course-was not forthcoming? More than I care to count. How many times have the clans captured, bound, and turned over my holy warriors to secure the release of their kin? I can count how many, but I'd rather not.
And now, instead of the insurgency being fed by locals as I had planned, I have more foreign born mujahadin than I do Sumeri. And the supply of foreign born will dry up, too, if the enemy ever figures out how to target their families back home. Pray Allah, they never shall.
Fadeel cut his musings short. He had people to meet, notably some new volunteers to the cause.
Ishmael was given some travel funds, just enough to see him to the next station on his journey. From home he'd traveled by bus halfway through Bilad al Sham, spending several nights in a safe house in the capital while there.
The safe house had been a shock after the spacious, well furnished and maid-swept expanse of his own home, back in Akka. Besides its being cramped and filthy, Ishmael had found himself with the first case of lice in his life.
If the quarters had been bad the food was… well, the less said about the food the better. The most that could be said for it was that it prepared a man for leaving this life without regret. After a few days of undercooked rice and goat with the hair still on, what was there to fear with death?
From the safe house, Ishmael had moved on to a school, of sorts. This was where he was to be trained. Surprisingly, his training, along with that of another four boys about his age, was not very military. In fact, based on the little Ishmael knew about the subject from his mother, it wasn't military at all. Certainly it was nothing like the courses of instruction Layla had told him about her having attended in her glorious youth. He never even saw a rifle, except for the two in the hands of the guards posted at the front gate to the school's walled compound.
Instead, Ishmael's training was ninety-nine percent religious, though whether the Prophet would have recognized it as such was debatable. It was geared, in the main, towards producing a young man willing to martyr himself. At that, the school was very efficient, especially when it had good material to work with.
'You came looking for martyrdom,' Fadeel observed to the new recruits. 'We shall help you to find it. More than that, we shall help your martyrdom to be of the greatest effect here on al Donya al Jedidah. To that end, each of you will make a tape. In those tapes you will explain yourselves and your commitment to the cause of Islam, Triumphant. The tapes will later be broadcast by al Iskandaria to inspire the masses and bring yet more volunteers. In the end, we cannot lose. There are over a billion of us; few of the crusaders.'
