The Last Infidel (7 page)

Tracy took a seat at one of the tables, grinned, and raised her eyebrows – her way of telling Cody they had things to talk about.

“You’ve obviously got something on your mind,” Cody said, and he pulled a wooden chair out from beneath the table and sat down.  He put his hands together and leaned forward with a vacant stare.  “I hope it has something to do with why you ran out on me.”

“I don’t really know how to say it, so I’m just going to say it,” Tracy said.

“I’m all heart and ears, darling,” Cody said, scrawling his finger around on the wooden table top.

“I left you because I loved you.”

Cody sat there, staring into Tracy’s eyes, the same blank stare on his face.  Not a wrinkle of the nose, not the squinting of the eyes, not a pursing of the lips.  Nothing.  He felt like the millionth winner in a million-dollar lottery game where everybody won the jackpot.

“ISA was marching on Nashville, you were going to be fighting in days, I was recruited by the Army of Tennessee.  I shipped out at two o’clock that Saturday.  I couldn’t bear the thought that you might be killed, so I ran.  Can you ever forgive me?”  Tracy reached across the table for Cody’s hand.  When she touched him, he slowly slid both of his hands back and set them in his lap.

“Just like that?” Cody said.  “Can I ever forgive you?  And you never once bothered to find out if I was still around?  I don’t know how that even works.”

“Your team, all of them, were killed – I tried for weeks to get information on your unit.  I want you to believe me, like you used to.  But you never will – that’s what your eyes are telling me.”

“It’s not that,” Cody said, his eyes fixing her even harder in a stony stare.  “It’s just that I haven’t slept in two years.  Now that you’re here, I won’t sleep for another two years.  In fact, I won’t be able to sleep much after July fifth because I’ll be dead.”

“Cody, I need the explosives,” Tracy said.

“Fireworks, huh?” Cody replied coldly.  “You know, I’d always hoped you and I would see them together one day, the way we’d always planned.  But something tells me you’ve probably been to the show more times than I have.  Who did you leave me for?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Cody Marshall, one of Islam’s greatest gifts to those it conquers is the scarcity of people, especially men – I haven’t much talked to a man for the last two years.  If I had, I don’t think I’d find a match – to finish your pun about the fireworks.”

“That’s funny,” Cody said, as he stood up, rubbing the stubble on his chin.  “You don’t seem to be the kind that strikes me either.”  He turned and walked towards the secret entrance.

Tracy got up and ran over to him.  “On July fifth, the last day of Ramadan, that pathetic mosque you’re building will be dedicated – all of ISA’s top leaders, and that worthless, turncoat president of ours, will be there to dedicate it.  Every single one of Bashar’s men, including men from one other unit, will be there, praying.  They’ll have their heads bowed east, and the brains in their filthy underwear pointing west.  After that, they march on Chattanooga.”

“And that means what?”

“That means we need to turn the tide of this war.”

{
12
}

The next morning, far too early and much too noisily, Jadhari’s guards became rough and ill-mannered in their hurry to get Cody Marshall up from the breakfast table and out the door.  Jadhari, the one usually sent by Bashar when Cody was needed, had not come.  Cody recognized the two young men as having been on the street below the hardware store the day before, the two lucky enough to dodge the chair he had thrown down at them.

“Where’s the other guy?” Cody asked, with a grin on his face.  When he got up from the table, he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.  If I would have killed him, would he still have gotten his seventy-two virgins?”

The guards, with hatred and fire in their eyes, but restraining themselves for their own sakes, said not a word.

“But if you’d bother to read that Koran of yours, you’d realize that you really only get seventy-two
raisins
.  Just the right size for guys like you, right?  But you can’t even read – and that’s just how your officers and your imam want you.  You know, guys?  If you’d just free your minds, your asses would follow.”

The two men, with their lips pursed and their hands trembling, barely able to restrain themselves from the looks of it, pushed Cody along with the butts of their rifles.  They pushed him towards the door and then onto the street, crossing the gutter first, where fresh sewage promised to boil shortly under another hot, summer sun.  Once across the street, they headed for the sidewalk leading to the doors of the courthouse. 

Cody took a long deep breath.  “Gotta love the smell of Islam in the morning, right fellas?  Is it true what they say about your right index finger?  You know, that the nail is longer and usually brown?  And that’s why you have to eat with your left hand?”  He shook his head.  “You would’ve thought toilet paper was some kind of indication of progress, right?”

One of the guards butted him in the back with his rifle, cursing in Arabic.

The courthouse, a three-story, pre-Civil War brick with a large clock tower sitting in the middle of the roof, had always impressed Cody.  He knew all there was to know about it, historically; and he’d even found a bullet fired during the Civil War lodged in the mortar between two bricks.

“I bet you two don’t know this,” Cody said, as he walked along.  “This guy, who called himself The Human Fly, climbed to the top of that bell tower with nothing but his bare hands and feet.  That was back in 1923, before your kind began turning America into the Gaza Strip.”

The guards nudged Cody again, this time a bit harder, and they all stepped up to the rear doors of the courthouse.  Cody opened the door on the right.

“This fly guy – he started to come down, having reached the top, but he lost his footing and fell,” Cody said.  “Slid off the roof, punctured his skull, and broke his neck before he hit the ground.  Hell of a mess.”

Cody pointed to the stairwell to his right, turned, and the guards followed him.

“The guy wasn’t from here,” he said, and he turned and pointed his finger up in the air, shaking it, to make the point.  “And nobody knew his name.  The local undertaker, right here on the square, laid him out in the window for a few days hoping somebody could identify him.  But, in the end, he started to get ripe.  The town couldn’t bear the reek any longer, and so they buried him in a mass grave down the road.  And that was that.  Life went on.”

Cody turned right and hurried up to the top of the steps, whistling as he went.  The recently-renovated courthouse hadn’t changed much since the ISA occupation.  The only thing conspicuously missing was running water, air conditioning, and toilet paper.  The toilets were still used, however, but they were hand-scooped daily by whichever of Cody’s men was lucky enough to draw the shortest straw. 

Bashar’s office was at the left rear of the courthouse, and the door was open, like it always was, when Bashar knew Cody was coming.  The guards saw him in, turned, and walked out.

“Come in, my old friend,” Bashar said, standing up as he spoke.

Tall, dark, and very handsome – fifty-seven-year-old Bashar el Sayed.  Leader of his own army, a high-ranking member of the Muslim Botherhood and an ISA general, Bashar was just back from a trip to Nashville.  His officers and men referred to him affectionately as Bash Man.

Cody took off his baseball cap and held it in front of him, not out of respect for the man who had raped and pillaged Tennessee, but because the two men, still friends of sorts, both shared a pleasant history together.  Funny, Cody thought, how that before the war, he had been able to spend as much time with Bashar as he had and never once suspect him of being the kind of guy who could later commit acts of unspeakable horror on so many defenseless people.

“You know, my friend – and I tell you every time I see you – none of this should have turned out this way,” Bashar said, almost as if he needed to convince himself.  “I never wanted it – you know, the violence.”

“If it helps your conscience, then I’m all ears,” Cody said, as if he’d said it before.

Cody understood him.  He knew that Bashar, in the past, had been part of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to non-violent, civilization jihad.  He’d done what had been asked of him, and he’d been effective.  Little by little, Muslim neighborhoods, filled with middle eastern immigrants imported by U.S. corporations and President Obama’s administration, started making demands of their city councils.  They demanded the banning of pork from school lunches: the board of education complied.  They insisted on prayer rooms in every place of business: the businesses were forced to provide them.  They fought for laws regulating the usage of privately owned gyms: the government made the health clubs comply until all of them closed their doors.  They worked to repeal the Second Amendment: Obama took everyone’s guns.

The Federal Government bowed to Muslim Brotherhood demands, every single one of them, up to and including the institution of Sharia Law in Muslim neighborhoods.  All for the sake of enhancing government power, all of it paid for and funded with money American politicians received from their wealthy, Islamist patrons.

“Look, Cody,” Bashar said, and he came out from behind his desk, carefully turning over a small, wooden picture frame.  “We’ve got a little problem.”

“The mosque will be ready, Bashar – you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“Yes, I know the mosque is on schedule, thanks to you.”

Cody felt a pain in his waist, a pressure of sorts, where he’d been shot.  He placed a hand over the old wound and leaned forward a bit, reaching out and steadying himself on the back of the red, upholstered chair.

Bashar rushed up to him and put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Please, sit down – can I get you something?”

Cody shook his head, took a deep, pained breath, and sat down in the chair.  “No, I’m good.  Must be a storm coming.  Whenever the barometric pressure changes, I feel like I’ve been shot all over again.  But you can let me get out of Murfreesboro – just look the other way.”

Bashar el Sayed squeezed Cody’s shoulder gently and returned to his dark, leather chair.  “It’s not so easy now.  You know the imam.  He hates you and he loves you at the same time.  Funny thing.  He doesn’t even know you.  But he’s going to have you killed.”

“I get it, Bashar,” Cody retorted, as he shook his head.  “I understand all the others.  It’s just you I don’t understand.  Sure, I know we were friends – at least on my part – but you knew what was coming down the road for people like me.  I fought your people in Nashville.  You should have washed me away in an acid bath two years ago, like you did the others.”

“We won’t talk about that – the killings,” Bashar said, with a scowl on his face. “I don’t like to talk about unpleasant things.”

“But you do kill.  And yet I know you don’t want any part of it – or do you?”

“My men kill.”

“And they’re going to kill me on July fifth or sixth,” Cody said.  “Word travels fast around here these days.  And when I see you out there, out in the field, you’re a completely different man than the one I know right now, right here in this office.”

Bashar kept his eyes on Cody, not saying a word.

Cody could tell his old friend wanted to change the subject, or at least to look away; but Bashar did neither.  And Cody didn’t blink.  Instead, he looked at Bashar, seeing hurt and injury, something terminal, deep in the dark eyes of his opponent.  Bashar knew what lay on the fast approaching horizon, he thought.  The only question was if he would tell Cody.

“In a few days,” Bashar said, “the last day of Ramadan will come.  On that day, just before sundown, I will no longer be in charge here.  Your men will all die.  But for you, I have this.”  He pulled open his drawer and pulled out a crescent shield.  He stood up and handed it to Cody.

Cody took it and weighed it in his hands.  A round, crescent encircling a star made of pure silver.  He looked closely at it, turning it over in his hands, and said, “Number thirteen?  You’ve got to be kidding me, Bashar.”

“You’ve always said the thirteenth hole was your lucky hole!”  Bashar laughed.  “This pass, this shield, will expire, as will all of my passes, on the morning of the sixth.  I can only hope word of that will not have reached any of the soldiers.  It might help you get out of Murfreesboro.  But it might not.”  Bashar ran his fingers through his thick, black, oily hair.  “But there’s something else.  The ring around Murfreesboro has been tightened.  Every exit, every road, is being watched. And a few smaller units are now, as of last night, taking up positions on every road. You will not get as far as you did a few nights ago.  And yes, you can have your truck back because you still have work to do.”

“You’re a study, old man,” Cody said.  “You kill like there’s no tomorrow and yet you somehow seem human.”

“I will forget you said that,” Bashar said.

“Why me, Bashar?” Cody asked.  “Of all the people in this big, wide world, why me?”

Basher smiled and nodded.  “I will assure you that I am faithful to the writings of Mohammed and loyal to Allah.  You have paid the
jizyah
, the capitation tax they levy on all the non-Muslims that they do not kill.”

“You mean the ones
you
don’t kill?”

“The ones they do not kill, enslave, or take as wives.  You have paid in labor because you have built the mosque.  It is with a clear conscience I can offer you this way of escape.  But it is also possible for others to stop your escape.  No one will question me – not even the imam.”

“Why not let the others go?” Cody asked dutifully, concerned for those who worked with him.  “Why can’t you allow Jose to escape?”

Bashar smiled, but he rolled right on, changing the subject.  “After today, we will no longer speak to one another like this.  It will be better for both of us – and I know you will understand.  And if I should see you on the street, be sure I will make life difficult for you because I am also being watched because our relationship is suspect.  I will single you out tonight – but know I do so with great pain and anguish and that, in another time and place, we could have played a round of golf.”

Cody nodded and, after a brief pause, said, “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

“You taught me that,” Bashar said.  “But you ask me why you and not the others?”

Cody nodded. 

“I once promised myself I would never tell you or anybody this because, for security reasons, we had to keep it secret,” Bashar said.  “You, my friend, once protected my son Jadhari, and you took a bullet for him when he was very, very small.”