Bekir knew what Abdullah thought. He was a true intellectual, a student of history, especially the history of conquest. Few could equal his knowledge and still fewer his passion for a return to true Islam, where Muslims were rulers and not subjects. Most leaders would have viewed him as a threat, but Abdullah lacked the spiritual charisma necessary to lead, and he knew that, which is why he had attached himself to Bekir. They made a perfect team.
“These days,” continued Abdullah, “a wealthy businessman from the Middle East has to make do with housemaid concubines from among the infidels of Cambodia, North Korea or Thailand. Only the sheikhs can afford the beautiful Slavic women we provide.”
“Did you know,” asked Bekir, “that the word
slav
is actually derived from the word slave?”
Abdullah nodded.
Of course Abdul-lah knew. He knew everything.
“Yet, today,” Bekir continued, “It is impossible to imagine a Muslim power in any of these lands. The infidel drove us out of Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, the Balkans, Greece, the Crimea and the Caucasus. The Reconquista overthrew us in Spain. The realms of the Mongol rulers of India were shrunk to less than half their former size. Our forefathers failed because they grew soft and broke faith with the principle of jihad. We must not let our zeal wane.”
He turned to face both of his companions and asked quietly.
“Is everything ready?”
“It’s ready. They are merely waiting for us to give the go-ahead.”
“What about the response?” he asked again quietly.
“Everything is in place. Vienna confirmed yesterday.”
“Are you satisfied with the plan for Vienna?” Bekir asked pointedly. Abdullah knew how much this part of the plan meant to him.
“Yes, I have reviewed everything: building layout, the resources, the drop-off point and the escape route. It is flawless as far as I am concerned.”
“When,” continued Bekir, “will we have the banner?”
“We should have it two days after it is retrieved. It will cross the border into Hungary hidden on a recycling truck. The Bosnians will take it to the Adriatic through Croatia. We want to avoid all of the border checkpoints on an overland route to Istanbul.”
“Excellent. Make the call and set everything in motion.”
His voice was beaming with enthusiasm and fierce joy. Abdul-lah’s face was grave. He had to make one last appeal.
“Bekir, you know that I’ve been your most constant companion against the enemies of Islam. I led your guerilla war against the Russians in a hopeless bid for Chechnya’s independence. You know how we were slaughtered down to the last man and only I escaped. You know I believe in the cause and have proven it, but do you think that the
ummah
is ready? Will they rise up in arms? Will their strength be sufficient? This will change the political landscape forever. We must be certain.”
Bekir spun around in anger. “If we wait for another generation, do you think there will be any Muslims left? We can barely find enough fighters as it is. The insidious inroads of the infidel threaten to turn our people into selfish individualists with no stomach for jihad and no faith in the command of the Prophet to subdue the infidel! How long will we wait? Now is the time to sound the call to arms, to invite one and a half billion Muslims to come back to faith, back to jihad, back to power! Allah has guided us to this point and opened every door. It is for us to walk through them.”
“I just want to be sure the timing is right, that’s all. If this is to be the match that lights the fire, we must be sure the wood is dry enough to catch. If it is wet, it will only smolder for a while and then go out. Are you sure the time is now? In twenty years, our numbers will be far greater, all the while their population declines. Their cynicism and unbelief will bleed their hearts of courage. In the past, they too rallied around their religion and their Church, but that has become virtually irrelevant. In twenty years, it will probably cease to exist altogether. Sometimes, victory requires patience.”
Bekir’s voice began to tremble.
“Three years of planning, and over five million Euro in research, equipment and man-power backed by the hopes and prayers of thousands. We are poised to strike these cursed dogs of unbelief. Now is the time. Now! May Allah kindle the fire of jihad in the hearts of every true Muslim and remember us with favor on judgment day. Make the call. I want a full day’s worth of news from this. I want every infidel to hear it over their cornflakes and every Muslim to begin their day of fasting with thanksgiving. I pray their joy makes them forget their pangs of hunger today.”
Bekir said nothing about the narrow escapes they’d had over the last three years, nothing about the fact that both governments and other Muslim groups had put a price on his head. Everyone understood that concern for his own safety and his fear of not completing his mission also guided his decision to move forward immediately. Any morning now, he expected to wake up and find himself dead.
><><><
A
NKARA,
T
URKEY
Yusuf pawed the nightstand beside his bed trying to silence the ringing phone. It was no use. He had left it on the chair just out of reach. He rolled out of bed, picked up the phone and forced his eyes to open and read the number. It was Selda. He looked at the clock. It was 05:59. His alarm would have gone off in one minute anyway. He flipped the phone open.
“Good morning, Selda. I assume there is a good reason for robbing me of my last minute of sleep.”
“Good morning, Captain. You need to turn on CNNTürk right now. We have no details yet, but I knew you would want to know.”
“Okay, thanks. See you in a couple of hours,” he said.
“I doubt it will be that long,” was all she said in reply.
He hung up, grabbed the clothes his wife had ironed the night before from behind the door and then closed it gently behind him. He walked across their small apartment. It was furnished a bit nicer than most of his colleagues could probably have afforded. Fortunately for him, his wife’s family had enough money to satisfy her tastes. His salary never would have. He grabbed the remote off the couch and turned on the flat-screen plasma TV, completely unprepared for what he was about to see. The images on the screen were horrific. There was no reporter holding a microphone in front of a camera. It was just raw footage with an unseen male voice providing a running commentary on the images being broadcast all over the country. A news flash scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
Twin terrorist attacks on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Resort hotel in Antalya leveled by bomb blast. German apartment complex set on fire in Alanya
.
Yusuf sat down to watch the broadcast sensationalized by an off-camera reporter. The hotel was flattened. He couldn’t image anyone surviving. It looked like a professional demolition job. The whole building had collapsed in on itself, which could only mean that the concrete columns supporting the structure had been sheared off with explosives.
The apartment complex in Alanya was still burning. The entire building had obviously been engulfed in flame, but the fire department had managed to extinguish the blaze at one end of the long rectangular structure. Orange flames still shot up at least twenty feet higher than the top floor at the other end of the three-storey apartment building. Yusuf guessed the building had a minimum of thirty flats. The absence of stretchers and ambulances was conspicuous. When the images began to be replayed, he grabbed his cell-phone and called Murat.
“Good morning, Murat. Have you seen the news this morning?”
“Yeah . . . Clearly retaliation for the skin-head attacks in Germany seven weeks ago.”
“Most likely. Do we have casualty figures?”
“Nothing official, of course, but I heard a reporter ask a manager from a nearby hotel what occupancy was. He said all the hotels were booked solid. This is the height of the tourist season, and that this was a 400-bed hotel, one of the largest on the Mediterranean. It had extensive connections to travel agencies in Russia. Because it happened so early in the morning, we can be fairly certain that the death toll will be almost one hundred percent of the guests.”
“Has anyone claimed responsibility?” asked Yusuf?
“I just got off the phone with media relations. He said all three of the conservative newspapers—
Zaman, Vakit
and
Vatan
—received anonymous phone calls five minutes after the explosion claiming that Hizbullah was behind the attacks. Apparently, the last thing they said on each call was the same, ‘Islam will rise on the wings of Jihad.’ All three were made from recently purchased pre-paid cell phones in Istanbul. But something seems strange about it all.”
“What?” asked Yusuf.
“Two things. First, it’s strange that the Turkish Hizbullah would hit non-political public targets. That isn’t how they work. They were created by the state to neutralize the leftists and separatist Kurds. As you know, most of the attacks like this in Turkey have been organized by the PKK, leftist splinter groups or Islamic groups like IBDA-C and Al Qaeda.”
“True, but once a monster is created, you cannot control how it develops or what it will feed off of. We have to assume there may be more attacks planned. Remember the last time this happened there were a string of attacks that hit two Jewish synagogues in Istanbul, and two British targets: a bank and the British consulate.”
“Right. The second thing I find odd is that Bekir and his group would strike targets in Turkey and not in Europe. Weren’t you sort of working on the assumption that he was leaving Turkey to organize something in Europe?” asked Murat.
“Yes, and I still think that’s the case, but right now, we need to find out what is happening here in our own backyard.”
“Well, they pulled this one off completely under the radar, so unless we get a break, I don’t see us making any headway any time soon.”
“Tell your wife not to make any elaborate dinner plans. Neither of us may be home for a couple of days.”
CHAPTER
41
I
STANBUL,
T
URKEY
A bearded man in his early twenties wearing a worn leather jacket sat on a park bench across from the statue of dancing girls in the Levent Square. None of the passersby paid him any mind. He stared up at a beautiful golden sculpture of five Turkish girls wearing knee-length dresses doing a folk dance in a circle. Their arms were joined, each had a foot thrust into the middle of the circle and they were leaning back with their long, beautiful locks flowing backwards in a stream of frozen bronze. What scandalized the young man was how they pushed their breasts up towards the sky. The statue twirled on top of a nine-foot chrome pillar, accentuating the sense of movement the sculptor had captured so well. It was a symbol of Atatürk’s Turkey. Yet, the young man considered it the work of the infidel because, like everything from the West, it was immodest and suggestive. Many of the young girls passing through the square on their way to work or school could have easily passed for the beautiful maidens twirling atop the pillar.
Over the last half hour, a constant parade of uncovered women and girls flaunting their hair and more besides had passed by in high heels, skirts or tight pants. He saw a long-haired girl with snow white skin walking towards the bank across the street. She reminded him of the Romanian prostitute he had been with a couple of weeks ago. The girl had obviously been crying as her face was red and streaked with tears. This made her look even more like the girl he had been with. The prostitute had cried most of the time.
His group leader understood the needs of young men, and made sure they were taken care of at least once a week. The brothel run by their organization was a small building in the Fatih neighborhood. All of the girls were forced to wear the head-covering though none of them were Muslims. For the last year and half, he had been assigned Monday night. Last week, however, he had been given permission to visit any time. His sheikh told him it would whet his appetite for paradise.