The Last Infidel (2 page)

Tracy didn’t move, nor did she look away from General Williams’ face.  She stood there like a rock, adamant, her face full of resentment, her brows furrowed, her lips taut.  Her body told the general one story.  But her heart told a different one – and she knew her old friend and boss could read it as plain as a map on a wall.  Or maybe she’d just told him one too many times how much she missed home, or how she’d wished things with Cody would have gone differently.  She brushed her damp, lank hair back behind her ear and said, “He . . . you’re saying Cody is still alive?  I want to hear you say it.”

General Williams smiled, nodded, and squeezed her shoulders.  “Yes, Cody Marshall is still alive.  And your country needs you to go into Murfreesboro, find Zafar Katila, and have him tell us how we stop Bashar.  You’re the only one who can make this happen.” 

“I still haven’t agreed to go,” Tracy said.

“I’ll brief you at 0530.”

“No, you won’t.”

{
3
}

In the summer of that year, the Army of Tennessee had recon teams working to the east of Knoxville at Farragut, and north to Crossville and Cookeville.  Their missions were to shadow any number of non-descript ISA units, grab what stragglers they could, and relay information back to command.  Two other teams, separate from the others, watched the western approaches south of Murfreesboro in Manchester and Shelbyville, two areas still under the nominal control of AT and normally quiet.  A small combat team, the last mobile combat unit remaining in Central Tennessee, worked out of what was left of the ruins of Arnold Air Force Base.

Because intelligence reports indicated ISA movements in the direction of Middle Tennessee, and because two teams, including Alpha Recon 4, were now out of action, headquarters wasted no time putting together two more teams, each consisting of five recruits and one experienced officer.  On the night of June 26, one of those teams was ready.  Tracy Graham would lead it.

General Williams and two of his aides, still on their feet after the 0100 staff meeting with Alpha Recon, pored over the latest intelligence reports.  According to General Williams, the mosque being built in Murfreesboro was “the most significant event in North America since the capture of the Atlantic states by Muslim forces three years earlier.”  This mosque, the largest ever built in the United States, would be finished on July fifth, the last day of Ramadan, and it would be built in the exact geographical center of the state.  The symbolism was hard to miss.

General Williams, a tall, thin man, younger-looking than his fifty-five years would suggest, was a retired English professor at Middle Tennessee State University.  Following high school, he joined the army, served the next fifteen years with the 101
st
Airborne out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, achieving the rank of captain.  At thirty-five, he was dishonorably discharged for his part in organizing a racially-charged
Black Lies Matter
event in Nashville that resulted in the death of three counterdemonstrators.

Williams spent the next two years fighting white privilege, writing articles for various liberal political groups, and organizing protests.  But when the state of Michigan elected an all-Muslim house and senate, instituted Sharia Law, and when ISA training camps began to emerge in that state, his life, like the lives of so many other Americans, changed.  Within a week of the Federal Government declaring Michigan a no-go zone, little Mogadishu, a Somali settlement in Minnesota, attacked Minneapolis with five thousand well-equipped men.  A day later, New York saw its first of four dirty bombs.  In Shelbyville, Tennessee, Somalis and Syrians, equipped with guns and machetes, cleared every subdivision in the city within twelve hours.  Within days, America had become a battle zone.  After that, not a single American called another by the name “stranger”.  “It was a sight to see,” Williams told a friend shortly after the war began, “when you walked into a place and saw the Klu Klux Klan and the Black Panthers sitting down to dinner together.”

General Williams quickly sifted through every piece of paper on his desk, and then he rubbed his hands over his face.  The intelligence reports devastated him.  In less than a month, Bashar’s Islamic Front Army, with three thousand men, would move south and challenge the Army of Tennessee for control of Chattanooga, the Tennessee River, and Northern Georgia.  Chattanooga might hold, it might not.  Zafar Katila, who knew intimately every logistical detail of ISA, could make the difference.  Zafar was the key.

This game of war, now entering the fourth quarter, was far from over.  Williams had great players on the sidelines.  Tracy Graham was one of them.  He’d sent her into the field numerous times; and she’d gone out only last month, trekking as far north as Crossville, Tennessee, returning to base with intel every bit as valuable as that gathered by the more experienced team leaders.  But she’d made it clear on more than a few occasions that under no circumstances would she return to Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

General Williams got up and called for his aide.  He walked over to his map of Murfreesboro and put his right index finger down on what used to be one of the college’s parking lots on Greenland Drive near the intersection of Old Las Casas Pike.  Where once there was a straight road now sat a mosque.  He drew a circle around it, slowly and thoughtfully.  Then he moved his hand east and tapped on the town square.  “Here’s where it will all play out.”

Langford, the general’s aide, stepped up beside him and said, “I hope this guy was worth Alpha Recon 4.” 

General Williams hoped so, too.  Zafar Katila, close to a few key men in Bashar el Sayed’s inner circle, needed to become even more important part of that circle; but he needed to capture the attention of Bashar in a heroic way in order to do earn his trust. 

Alpha Recon 4, offered up by the Army of Tennessee for that very purpose, had unknowingly played the part assigned them.  The covert agent had lied to Malone.  Zafar had no intentions of fleeing south. 

Two hours after Malone’s team ambushed Zafar’s convoy, they, in turn, were ambushed by men under Zafar’s command.  Zafar, once a member of the Tennessee Islamic Forum for Democracy and now devoutly Christian, would be richly rewarded by Bashar for taking the initiative in removing an enemy reconnaissance team; and Zafar, besides being elevated in rank, would also be able to choose a reward.

“She’ll never do it,” Langford said.  “You think Tracy’s really going to show up here and agree to undertake the mission?”

“Don’t underestimate her,” General Williams replied.

“Get herself captured?”  Langford hated the idea of losing Alpha Recon’s brightest mind to a mission as risky as this.  Command would never be able to replace her.

“We’ve been over this,” General Williams said.

“And what if that old horn dog Bashar wants her?”

“We don’t have that kind of luck,” General Williams said.  “Nobody will know it’s her anyway.  Besides, Bashar will offer Zafar the woman of his choice, Zafar will ask for the blonde-haired girl at the camp, and it’ll be a done deal.  Bashar may be a terrorist dog, but he’s honest.”

“I forgot you guys used to golf together.”

“Don’t remind me,” General Williams said.  “I should have clubbed him to death while I had the chance.”

“And the guards at the camp – what if they don’t look the other way when Tracy sneaks in?”

“Just be glad they like guns and Jack Daniels,” General Williams said.  He picked up the old, rotary dial phone and called the quartermaster.  Supply always did an excellent job with the field equipment, but he felt Tracy needed to have her head shaved in the morning.  She also needed jeans and a tee shirt to change into once she’d arrived in Murfreesboro, preferably something stripped off the body of a prisoner of war.  He gave the order and hung up the phone.

“If there’s a way for us to stop Bashar,” General Williams said, looking at Langford, “Tracy Graham will find it.  And if she can get Cody Marshall back into the game, the two will be unstoppable.”

Langford raised his eyebrows and said, “Yep, as long as we can get them to talk to each other.”

{
4
}

Cody Marshall had no intentions of backing out.  The second he’d laid his eyes on the stash of explosives hidden in the basement of the destroyed church building, the question in his mind was not
if
he would use it, but
how
and
when
.  Fifty pounds of C-4 would be more than enough to blow a hole through Bashar’s western checkpoint, defenses and all; and Cody would be able to simply walk away from Middle Tennessee with a pack slung across his back and a rifle in his hands.  He wanted out of this hell.  And he wanted out soon.

Even a casual, disinterested glance at the stack of C-4, each one-pound stick wrapped tightly in green plastic, all of them nicely stacked at the far end of the basement, showed a pile of at least two hundred pounds.  Three boxes of detonators, a mix of manually-activated handhelds, digital timers, and a couple of remotes, sat in front of the pile. 

“And you’re telling me that six Americans put these here last night?  Six Americans and one of Bashar’s men?”  Cody asked.

Marcus, a boy of twelve who lived with his mother beneath the ruins of the old Emmanuel Methodist Church on Hall’s Hill pike, nodded.  “We hid – and they didn’t see us.”

“Who was the Muslim guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was short and he wore a blue Titan’s baseball cap.”

“And the Americans were working with him?”

Marcus nodded.

“And nobody but you and your mom know about this?”

Marcus nodded again, and he looked at the small back pack Cody had put down on the floor.

Cody got the hint and apologized.  He opened the pack and dumped its contents onto a wooden work bench against the wall: five tins of sardines, a loaf of bread, and an old bottle of Flintstone’s chewable vitamins.  Cody reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of perfume.  “We can’t leave all this stuff here, so I’m going to come back tonight and---”

“There’s another part of the basement we can hide it in.”  Marcus’ mother, Lisa, had just climbed down through the rubble, quickly and quietly, her movement perfected after two years of hiding and foraging.  She laid two rabbits out on the work bench and hung her bow and quiver from a peg driven into an old, hand-hewn floor joist.  Her dark brown hair ran down her back in a single braid, nearly touching the belt holding up her camouflage cargo pants.  “Marcus knows not to tell you about it but, given the circumstances,” she said, nodding at the pile of C-4, “I think we need to move this ‘stuff’, too.  And they’ll never find it behind the rocks on the other end of the basement.  They haven’t found us there, yet.”

Cody looked at his watch.  The sun would be up in an hour.  “That’s a pile to move,” he said, and he looked towards the exit.

“Like we have anything better to do?” Lisa said, smiling when she saw the bottle of perfume. “
Love Me Tender
?  Don’t get any ideas – not yet, anyway.”

Cody smiled.  He liked looking at Lisa – loved it more when she got testy.

“We’ll hide it – just make it worth our while,” she said.

“Deal.  What do you want?”

“A rifle, preferably .308, silenced, a hundred rounds,” Lisa said.

Cody Marshall groaned.  “That’s a serious piece of hardware.”

“And C-4 isn’t?” Lisa said.

“Silenced rifles don’t appear in my bedroom overnight.”

“You think whoever put this here isn’t coming back for it?  Fine then.”

Cody cleared his throat and looked at Lisa.  “Will you settle for just any type of silenced rifle?”

“I’m a realist, Cody,” Lisa said.  “What do you think?”

Cody looked at Marcus and said, “Thanks for telling me.”  He stuck his finger into Marcus’ ribs and rubbed the top of the boy’s head.  Then he hugged him.  He made his way towards the rubble heap on the other end of the basement, turned and smiled at Lisa, and slipped out into the darkness. 

Five in the morning.  Dawn was only minutes away.

Cody Marshall, the six-foot-one, twenty-nine-year-old ex-sheriff of Rutherford County, the manager overseeing the construction crew building Bashar’s new mosque, looked across the piles of trash towards the road to Woodbury.  In the darkness, standing near piles of debris and multi-colored pieces of garbage, everything from metal roofing to soda cans and tall weeds, a single man like him, dressed in blue jeans and a red shirt, was just another piece of wreckage.  Out here, Cody could probably walk up to one of Bashar’s patrols, slap the officer in the face, and never be seen. 

He climbed into his blue, custom, Ford F-150 pickup and started the engine.  He made his way slowly up Hall’s Hill Pike, heading towards the university; but he kept his headlights off.  When he crossed the old intersection where Halls Hill Pike crossed MTSU Boulevard and became Greenland Drive, he turned the lights on.  Five minutes later, he drove onto the town square, parked his truck, and got out.

Cody Marshall looked across the street from the courthouse parking lot.  He carefully studied the goings on behind the glass window of the dimly lit
See You Latte Café
.  Just a Hispanic and a white guy.  Doable, especially since the Hispanic guy was Jose Lozano, the local black marketeer with customers on both sides of the war, and who happened to be Cody’s foreman for the mosque job.  Cody had had to arrest him a few times in the past, before the war, even though they’d grown up together.  But that was all in the past, forgiven, if not forgotten.

Cody hurried across the street and stepped up onto the old cobblestone walk.  He peaked inside the door, called for cup of coffee, and took a seat at a small, wooden table outside, just in front of the cafe.  The weather felt cooler this morning, less humid; and that meant easier breathing at the work site.  A couple of Bashar’s men, older, tired-looking guys, were arguing in front of the courthouse.  To Cody’s right, two guards leaned against the doors of the old Rutherford County Health Clinic building, which had now become a police station.  To the left, on the east side of the square, a half dozen of his construction workers gathered around a Muslim street vendor bartering for their breakfast.  He put his elbows on the table, put his face in his hands, and closed his eyes.  He listened for the six o’clock bell, but it never came.  Time didn’t count in hell, he thought.  Why would it count here?

Cody quickly raised his head and looked towards East Main Street.  The door to the See
You Latte Café
swung open and Jose, with a mug of coffee in his hands, stepped out. 

Cody and Jose heard the squealing of tires a block or two away.  Then the crash of something metal.  Cody got up and walked to the edge of the sidewalk in time to see an old Fed Ex van being driven through the stop sign at East Main.  The van turned sharply to the right and drove up onto the curb where it took out an old, blue mailbox.  The driver got the van back on the road, turned left, and skidded to a stop. 

Four Muslims jumped out of the vehicle. They brandished new rifles, rifles not normally used by Bashar’s men, and they hurried towards the tall oak doors of the Greenspan Realty and Auction building, the business next door to the café.  A fifth man jumped out of the back with a small battering ram.

“You’ve gotta hand it to Bashar’s men,” Cody said to Jose.  “They really know how to drive.”

The four armed men, all of them dark-skinned middle easterners, stepped aside and allowed the man with the battering ram to step up to the door.

“Old Fred will have a surprise or two for these guys,” Cody said, reaching slowly around to his back pocket.  “He has those doors bolted up, down, and sideways.  By now he’s grabbing his forty-five.  But I’ll bet you two mercury dimes Fred gets thrown from the third-story window.”

“No, they’re gonna shoot him,” Jose said.  “I’ll raise you a silver half, but only after we get under cover.”

“I’ll see that bet,” Cody said, taking hold of his chrome handcuffs, slipping them quietly from his rear pocket so Jose wouldn’t notice.  He looked at Jose and motioned towards the door of the café.

Jose turned towards it.

With a quick step and the flick of his wrist, Cody, with frightening speed, locked a cuff around Jose’s right wrist.  The other cuff he locked around his own left wrist.

Jose spun around, whey-faced and horror-stricken.  He then turned and looked nervously at Bashar’s men, who had just started to swing the battering ram against the door.  Then he turned and looked at the door of the café, and then back at Cody.

“What are you afraid of?” Cody asked.  “Don’t you want to see who wins the bet?”

“This . . . this isn’t fair,” Jose said, his voice high-pitched and shaky.

Cody raised a single brow, rubbed the light colored stubble on his face, and said, “Twenty years ago this summer.”

Jose scrunched his dark eyebrows together and said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

The doors to Fred’s building crashed open with the second swing of the ram, and Bashar’s men ran in, yelling and screaming like Muslims always did.

“I . . . I uncuffed you when that train was at least half a mile away, not when it was like fifty feet away!”

“So, you do remember,” Cody said.  “Half mile?  Nah.  A tenth of a mile – and I could feel the tracks vibrating.”

Gunfire rang out, four or five shots, loud and sharp.  A window shattered – one of the second floor windows – and glass came raining down onto the cobblestone below.

“That would be Fred’s forty-five,” Cody said.  “Hell of a gun – I’d love to have it.”

“But that was like a hundred years ago, man!” Jose yelled.

“Twenty, Jose. You left me on the tracks for an hour – sixty minutes,” Cody replied, looking at his watch.  “You stand here with me for sixty seconds and we’ll call it even.  It’s a deal – you’re getting away with ten cents on the dollar!  You live for those kinds of deals, right?”

“But Bashar’s men – they don’t take sixty seconds.  And they use a hell of lot more bullets, too!”

Cody smiled and looked up at the sky and rubbed his strong, angular jaw.  He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the heavens.  “Maybe Fred’s wearing a bomb vest and he’s going to take out Bashar’s men – that’d be a blast, right?”  He jerked on the cuffs, dragging Jose closer to the door of the realty building like a man walking a reluctant dachshund.

“Come on, man!” Jose yelled, tugging Cody in the opposite direction.  “You’re crazy to be joking around at a time like this!  I shoulda left you on the tracks that day!”

“Would have been better that way,” Cody said, looking sideways at Jose. “You know?  I was just thinking.”

“Thinking? At a time like this?”

“Remember Dottie, the girl who’d won the beauty pageant a few years ago?  You remember she lived out on Red Mile road by the---”

“I don’t want to remember!”

Another two shots rang out.  Still Fred’s forty-five.

Jose trembled, then he got down on his knees and closed his eyes.  Cody gave him some slack, and Jose put his hands together and began mumbling a prayer in Spanish.

“A real hero, that Dottie,” Cody said calmly.  “When Bashar’s men found out she was hiding – and you remember how her dad used to use TNT to blow old stumps out of the ground – she made those bastards come up three flights of steps to the attic.  Those horny sons of Satan – they went right for her skirt like rabid dogs after fresh kitten.”

More gunshots.

Jose prayed frantically.

“And I’ll be danged if that girl didn’t take out the entire top story of that house and ten of Bashar’s men with her,” Cody said.  “The only thing they found left of her was her skull and her spine lying in the front---”

The sound of a crash, bright and glassy, caught Cody’s attention.  He jerked on the cuffs, pulling Jose over onto the ground, dragging him back just as shards of glass came crashing down onto the sidewalk in a shower of glitter.  He looked up.  Fred was being dangled above the sidewalk by two men, each one holding onto one of his legs.

“Serves him right,” Cody said. “He and that Chamber of Commerce wanted cheap labor, asked for a thousand Syrians, and that was that.  I told ‘em, didn’t I?  I warned ‘em.”

Jose struggled to his feet.  “Let’s just go, man.  I don’t wanna to see this!”

“Well, what do you know?” Cody said.  He took out his keyring and removed the cuff on Jose’s wrist and then from his own.

Jose started for the door to the café.  Cody grabbed his arm and swung him around.  Jose looked up.  Bashar’s men were pulling Fred back through the window. 

“I ain’t never seen that before,” Jose said with relief.

“So, Fred finds himself caught in the middle of something,” Cody said.  “Bashar must want him alive.”

“You know Bashar – go ask him,” Jose said.

Cody grinned sardonically and said, “I couldn’t care less about what he does with Fred.”

“Let’s just go,” Jose said, “Or they’ll beat the hell out of us, too.”

“Give it a minute.”

Cody could hear Bashar’s men tripping down the hollow, wooden steps from the second floor of the Greenspan building.  A second later, there came a crash: someone had just swung the two front doors open against their hinges. Two of Bashar’s men, with their unusual rifles slung over their shoulders, and with Fred between them, stepped out onto the sidewalk, dragging Fred with them.  They loaded him into the back of the Fed Ex van.