The Last Infidel (3 page)

“Looks like Fred got two of those bastards,” Jose said.

“Three,” Cody said, smiling.  “And that means there are some nice guns up there somewhere.”

“We’ve got a few minutes before the meat wagon pulls up,” Jose said, his eyes alight with the fire of probable profit.  “You wanna go through the front door or through the basement tunnel?”

{
5
}

They waded through the algae-filled water, Tracy Graham and her men moving silently through the river with the water up to their necks.  Tracy had led them to an old waste water drain emptying into Stones River just behind the Golf Course Camp.  Raw sewage, fresh and powerful, made their heads reel.  She’d canoed here as a child.

“Now, I want you to have an open mind,” General Williams had told her two days earlier at her 0530 briefing.  She’d just stood there at attention and listened, staring straight passed him while trying to keep her tired eyes from rolling into the back of her head.  By 0535, she’d heard enough to shock her into wakefulness.  “I’m sorry, Tracy – but there’s nobody else who can make this work.”

“And I’m supposed to marry this guy, Zafar Katila?” she’d asked him, while she shook her head.

“He’s got a wife and kids back in Valdosta, he’s a devout Christian, and he knows his business and ours,” General Williams had told her.  “You’ll have free reign of the town – at least as long as Bashar’s in control.  How long that will be, I don’t know.  But you need to tell Zafar what to look for, get the information he gives you to our guy, and play the part of the---”

“I know, I know – the faithful wife,” Tracy had said.

One of Tracy’s men found a tree branch stuck into the bank with a piece of red fabric hanging from it.  He motioned for the recon team to stop, and he waded over to Tracy, telling her they had reached the position.  They were on time.  1130 hours.  Everybody, including probably the guards, would be downshifting, either eating or sleeping.

“I’ve got it from here,” Tracy whispered, as she climbed up onto a pile of limestone rocks.  The team, who remained in the water, fanned out along the river’s rocky edge and watched the bank.  Tracy quickly changed into a pair of old, worn out jeans and a dirty tee shirt, and handed all of her gear back down to a team member.  The only thing she kept was a silenced Glock 33, a .357 semiautomatic pistol wrapped and sealed in a waterproof plastic bag.  She nodded at the man closest to her, and the team quickly vanished into the darkness, leaving nothing but a swirl on the surface of the river.  So far, so good: they had not been ambushed.

Tracy had an uncomfortable feeling coming back to the Old Fort Golf Course.  She’d learned to play golf here, and she had too many memories of the place – all of which haunted her dreams like ghosts, because all of the people she remembered from this place were ghosts.

The finger-shaped isthmus, now a camp that held women, girls, and small boys, began as a fortress and supply depot for Federal Troops following the defeat of General Bragg’s Confederate Army in the winter of 1863.  Then it became a golf course and a park, then it was transformed only recently into a prison camp.

If Americans living south of Tennessee could hardly understand the mindset and culture of Islam, what they heard about Golf Course Camp, information they gleaned from captured Muslim soldiers and a few escapees, was incomprehensible.  A specially-organized unit, one that travelled in the rear of ISA combat troops, took control of captured towns and cities minutes after the last shots had been fired.  With the help of dogs, any remaining civilians, whether man, woman, or child, were rounded up, separated according to age and sex, and graded.  Men and women over the age of fifty, and children under the age of five, were summarily executed by beheading.  Able-bodied men were marched off to work and certain death.  Young boys, girls, and beautiful women, regardless of their ages, were sent to Golf Course Camp where they went up for auction.

Rumors of atrocities taking place at Golf Course Camp had caused considerable alarm in the south and in the west, though Tracy Graham gave little credence to the idea that new arrivals, when first captured, were strung together by a single strand of hundred-pound test fishing line with hooks through their noses and marched into the compound.  But one thing did worry her.  One report suggested the camp was guarded by older American women.  These were women who wouldn’t bring a silver dime in an Islamic brothel filled with drunk Muslims. They were women who had converted from Christianity to Islam only to save themselves from execution.

Climbing up the rocky bank, holding onto exposed tree roots, Tracy got her first sight of Golf Course Camp.  She panned her eyes from the left to the right in moonlit darkness, taking it all in with a single sweep of her head.  Oil lamps – a necessity in modern America following ISA’s use of EMP weapons to destroy the electrical grid and every solitary item that depended on electricity – dotted the camp from one end to the other.  Long wooden shacks, probably engineered and built by ISA captives, ran along the inside of the fence not twenty feet from where she knelt.  A guard carrying a lamp walked along the fence fifty yards to her left, moving away from her.  She saw another on the right.

“Any day now, darling, or are you going to sit there all night long?” A soft, pleasant voice said.

Tracy froze in place, not moving a muscle, not batting an eyelash.  She cut her eyes slowly to the right, seeing nothing.  Somebody must have been standing on the other side of a small, bushy shrub.  “Aqua Velva,” she whispered, waiting for the counter password.

“If only,” the woman replied, answering her challenge correctly.  “These Muslims sure could use it.  They smell so bad I could faint – but I haven’t had a bath in two weeks, so---” The woman, dressed in a dark-colored Burka, stood up from behind the shrub, took a few steps, and knelt down beside a wooden fence post.  She pulled back the square mesh wire – how it was fastened to the post, Tracy couldn’t tell – and Tracy slipped into the compound.

Tracy handed the woman the plastic-wrapped Glock 33.  “There’s an extra clip in there – you’ve got nine rounds in each clip and one in the chamber.  Nineteen total shots – make them count.”

The woman gave Tracy the once-over and nodded.  Her manner seemed disinterested and hostile.  “I’ll make them count,” the woman said.  “You just do what I tell you if you want to live past tonight.”  She reached into her pocket, pulled something out, probably a small stone, and threw it against the wall of the nearest shack. 

A woman, tall, with a shaven head, came quickly from around the side of the shack.  She carried a small satchel with her, and she was dressed in dark jeans and a white tee shirt.  Without a word, she slipped through the fence and disappeared down to the river bank.

“If it’s that easy, why don’t you all just leave?” Tracy said.

“You really don’t have a clue, do you?  If anybody disappears from my section, I get killed.  If there’s an extra girl in the morning, I get killed.  That’s all I’m going to say to you now except to tell you that you are now Susan Reid.  Once you get settled into your bed, don’t look at or speak to anyone.  Let’s go.”

The woman looked up and down the long fencerow and, convinced no other guards were close by, she grabbed Tracy by the arm and pulled her along behind her.  She hurried towards the shack nearest them, stopping at the corner of the building.  She leaned her head forward and scanned the part of the camp known as The Yard, the grassy assembly area between the shacks.  She turned to Tracy and said, “Give it a minute.”

Tracy knelt down and looked around the corner of the roughly built shack, squinting into the dimly lit compound.  Less than two years old, the camp looked like a ruins.  Even up here, the hot, humid air reeked of human filth and sweat.  She saw two men.  One large, heavy-set man with an AK-47 slung across his back, and one skinny guy without a weapon, limping as he walked.  They were crossing The Yard at the far end, near the shacks opposite them.  “What’s . . . what’s up with those two guys?”

“Booty call,” the woman said.  “Just be glad you’re in section C, where they keep all the ugly chicks.”

The woman didn’t move, and both she and Tracy kept their eyes focused on the center of The Yard, not moving a muscle, not daring to breathe.

Tracy hadn’t looked forward to this part of her mission, and she was surprised at how quickly she became fearful for her own life.  The urge to grab the weapon she’d given the woman, shoot the two guards, and bolt back the way she’d come seemed like the only reasonable thing to do.  But she reminded herself she’d be here for only a day.  Two at the most.  Zafar Katila would get word of her arrival in just a few short hours – or maybe he already knew she’d arrived – and he would send for her.  Tracy closed her eyes for a moment, then she opened them.

As she looked out across the camp, trying her best to shut it all out, Tracy suddenly felt herself in the middle of the war in way she had never felt before.  She wasn’t at a desk or on a “safe” recon mission, but right in the middle of the crap, right in among those who needed her most: the vulnerable, the powerless, the endangered.  Then it hit her.  Armed soldiers had a chance.  They might die once in combat, die horribly of wounds they’d received on the field of battle; but the unarmed women and young children in this camp, in the hands of the Islamists, would die every day and live to remember it.

Tracy felt the woman grab her shoulder.  She watched as the two men disappeared into a shack on the far right of The Yard.  Then she heard women screaming, high-pitched and terrible; and she felt the woman digging her nails into her bicep.

“Now,” the woman said.  “Follow me.”

Tracy, energized by her fear, bucked up with a renewed sense of urgency and mission, bolted into an upright position.

The woman led Tracy around the side of the shack and towards the front door.  Up the rickety, wooden steps they hurried.  With one hand, the woman threw open the door and, with the other, she pushed Tracy across the threshold. 

Right into the face of the camp commander.

{
6
}

Shaheed Abad, the camp overseer, was a dark-skinned, six-foot-tall, balding Islamist wearing a pair of designer jeans too snuggly and a yellow silk shirt printed garishly with palm trees and coconuts.  He wound up his hand-cranked halogen flashlight, flipped it on, and shined it right into Tracy’s eyes.

The woman looked at Tracy, and with lightning speed, grabbed her by the back of her shirt and threw her against the door jamb.  Shaheed just shook his head.  The woman began to speak, but Shaheed waived for her to keep her mouth shut, acting like a magician trying to make a scantily-clad woman disappear.  She let go of Tracy and looked down at the ground.

Tracy never took her eyes off Shaheed, mesmerized by the profound evil she saw – or maybe she’d just imagined it – and unaware of the consequences of maintaining direct eye contact with any Islamist.  She held his gaze for the next few seconds.  Had she wanted to do so, and she’d thought about it, she could have incapacitated him where he stood and then slowly killed him.  A fitting end, she thought, for such a half-life posing as a man.

“I am looking for Susan Reid,” Shaheed said.  “And since no one in this barracks answers to that name, Mrs. Julia Parker, I assume this woman is Susan.”

A sudden coldness hit Tracy, and she stiffened even more.  She cut her eyes over to the burka-clad woman.  Julia Parker?  Not the same Julia Parker of Mt. Zion Baptist church, the wife of Jason Parker, the preacher.  Her old high school Bible class teacher, a woman of conviction and compassion, and only ten years older than she was, could never have joined the ranks of Islam. She’d been Islam’s loudest opponent a few years earlier when the Muslim community tried to build a mosque south of town.  And it was because of her efforts the construction was stopped.

“She was trying to escape,” Mrs. Parker said, softly and passively.  “I hope to please you, my master, and protect what is yours.”

Shaheed slowly lifted his right hand.  Tracy saw it holding a coiled whip of dark brown, leather.  He put the coil under the chin of Mrs. Parker and gently lifted her head.  Then he said, “Tomorrow, before breakfast, you will remind Miss Reid, and the rest of the ladies in the camp, about Islam, about submission, won’t you?”

Mrs. Parker nodded vigorously, her eyes never once looking up.

“Now, you will take Miss Reid to my office, like you do the others,” Shaheed said.  “You know how I like them,” Shaheed said, cutting his eyes over to Tracy.  “Am I clear?”

Mrs. Parker hadn’t stopped nodding since she’d felt the whip beneath her chin.

“And when you are done whipping Miss Reid in the morning, you will take her place, and she will be revenged for what you have done to her.”

Tracy’s lips trembled; and she could feel her face tingle as – she was sure – it turned ashen white.  She felt panic setting in, recognized it for what it was, and focused on breathing steadily and slowly.  She tried counting every breath, something her training had taught her to do when under stress.  But the more she tried to distract herself, the more she zeroed in on what the camp overseer said was about to happen to her. 

Her insertion into the barracks was supposed to be the easiest part of her mission.  Now, instead of sleeping with the other prisoners, itself a harrowing undertaking, she would be taken to Shaheed Abad’s office where she would be presented to him the way he liked for women to be presented to him.  No doubt this son of Satan saw her as a spoil of war to be spoiled.

Shaheed took his whip and motioned towards the door and nodded.  “Go now,” he said. “And do not let me find you where you are not supposed to be.  Hut, hut, hut!  Like it was yesterday!”

Mrs. Parker grabbed Tracy’s arm, swung her around, and pushed her out through the door.  Tracy lost her footing and stumbled down the steps, landing on the dusty, bare ground.  She picked herself up, unhurt, and gave Mrs. Parker a strong, hard eye as she came down the steps.  Shaheed, still standing near the threshold, looked down at Tracy and laughed.

Tracy managed to hold herself together, physically and emotionally, as Mrs. Parker pushed her along, slapping the back of her head with an open palm.  She saw three shacks at the far end of The Yard, all of them exact replicas of the poorly-designed, shoddily-built prisoners’ barracks.  Lights, probably from incandescent bulbs powered by gasoline-powered generators, lit the porches and glowed behind glass windows.  A few Muslims, all wearing matching fatigues and holding their weapons, sat on the porches.  They laughed and ate while a couple of women served them.

Mrs. Parker headed towards the shack in the center.  At her signal, the men on the porch stopped eating, jumped up, and hurried down the steps, disappearing into the shadows.  The others, still seated on the porches to the right and left, just stared and pointed.

“Seems like they’re afraid of you,” Tracy said.  She started up the steps and hesitated when she felt the first step flexing beneath her foot like the floor of an inflatable bounce house.  Typical Muslim construction, she thought: shoddy, cheap, and inferior.

Tracy felt another blow on the back of her head, harder than the ones she’d already received, and she lost her balance, falling forward on the steps, breaking her fall with her hands.  She turned around to get up, and Mrs. Parker, as well-trained as any prize fighter, drove her fist into Tracy’s face as if aiming for the back of her skull.  She felt her head fly backwards and hit the steps.

Mrs. Parker put her face close to Tracy’s and whispered through her clenched teeth, “Get up, b----, before I smash your head into a million pieces.”

Nobody not within a few inches of Shaheed’s rickety, poorly-built steps could’ve heard the things she had just been told by Mrs. Parker.  Tracy’s being pushed down the steps a few minutes earlier, and the blows to the back of her head, were all part of an act, things her old Bible School teacher did to keep up the illusion of her conversion to Islam and her support for her boss.  Tracy believed that a minute earlier.  Now, she wasn’t quite sure.

Mrs. Parker pulled Tracy to her feet using the neck of her tee shirt as a handle.  She told her to get moving. 

Tracy could see Mrs. Parker’s eyes through the opening in her burka, eyes cold and angry, dark and obsessed with the job assigned to her.  In a fit of brazen defiance, Tracy let out a bit of nervous laughter, a cackling sound of independence and defiance, and she walked up the rickety wooden steps holding onto an equally rickety handrail. 

She thought about Mrs. Parker.  Islam had dismantled her, had broken the woman she once knew, a woman who had once been a significant person in her own life and in the lives of so many others, most of whom had probably come to rather untimely and inhumane deaths.

Mrs. Parker opened the door to Shaheed’s shack and motioned towards a hallway on the left.  The inside of the shack looked worse than the outside and smelled three times as bad.  A couple of bags of trash, redolently sweet and probably filled with a week’s worth of refuse, racked Tracy’s sense of smell.  Dirty clothes and empty soda cans littered the floor.  Pornographic pictures, all of them looking like they’d been printed off a cheap, color printer, papered the walls at eye level.

Tracy, walking in front of Mrs. Parker, was shown through the first door to the right.

“Take off your clothes,” Mrs. Parker said.

“Like . . . like hell I will,” Tracy shot back.

“Hell is what you’ll get if you don’t.”

“You taught me just the opposite a few years ago in Bible Class, if I remember correctly.”

“Take them off now, or call the help,” Mrs. Parker said.  “And you won’t want the help, if you get my meaning.”  She reached into a pocket of her Burka and pulled out a whistle.

“And how about if I tell Shaheed about the gun I gave you?”

Mrs. Parker raised the whistle to her lips.

Tracy relented.  After she had removed her clothes, Mrs. Parker told her to lay down on the mattress.  Tracy’s wrists were bound with handcuffs to the headboard and, with her legs spread apart, had her ankles bound to the foot board. 

Mrs. Parker, probably out of a sense of duty, or maybe because she needed some credit with God, however small, said, “He won’t take you – he knows Zafar owns you.  He’s just trying to humiliate you.”  She turned on her heels and beat a path down the hall, though the front door, and back to the other side of hell.