“We are so badass,” Andrew finally said flatly.
“Andrew,” the imam asked, “I have to know. Why? No virgins await you, only nothingness by your own beliefs. If there is no afterlife, this life is meaningless, so it must be so for you. But I cannot abide that. Please, now, on the cusp of your greatness, tell me your reasons.”
Andrew didn’t bother to repay the earnestness with eye contact. Clearly the W-word—why—wasn’t of much interest to him. He’d been asked it a thousand times, by teachers, deans, cops, shrinks, counselors, parents, short-term girlfriends, everybody, anybody. He preferred not to hassle with it. It was psychobabble Muzak to his ears. He shrugged his shoulders.
“One reason I did it for you is because everybody hates you. That is so cool. I love the way you guys feed on that hate and it makes you bigger and stronger and more intent on your cause, which otherwise makes no fucking sense at all to me.”
In fact, he really didn’t give a shit about the dumb-bunny Kaafis. Anyone that stupid was doomed, and the rational functioning of natural selection had worked within design specifications to cull them from the herd, and what the Crips and Bloods did to their asses in the dark of a jungle penitentiary night was of little concern to him. Empathy was not one of his gifts; he actually thought the idea of the thin and beautiful and young and tender Somalis being gangbanged was pretty funny. The point of the prisoner release had really been just to stall things out for three hours or so, in order to let the networks set up so that the final act would play out in prime time before a world audience.
He thought a bit—meanwhile, the majestic jet had made it to the end of the airstrip and was rotating on its tires to orient itself for the long surge to liftoff—and finally applied himself at last to the conundrum that was Andrew Nicks.
Ideas, abstractions, conceits, causes—all were more or less hazy to him. He had no sense of nation or state, none whatsoever of “American interest,” and to him the government was simply the entity that prevented the Osama kill shot from making it to Fox.
The game was everything. It superseded all. It provided framework, a set of rules, a rising litany of satisfied expectations, level by level, until the ultimate moment, and that moment was the point. Didn’t they get that? Come on, assholes, I want to see the ultimate moment, the kill shot, when the SEAL operator double-taps pieces of flying steel at three thousand feet per into the famous mug of the Tall Guy, and he spasms backward amid a sudden atomized mist of Cuisinarted plasma and brain cells. I want to see his eyes go all cue ball as the pupils rotate upward in the split second before his knees give and he notices his brains now decorate the wall and the ceiling. But no. We’re so delicate all of a sudden. You have violated the rules of the game. You have set up the greatest narrative since World War II and demanded our attention, and when the climax arrives, you demurely avert your eyes, you assholes. You unbelievable pansy jerkoffs. You have violated the rules of the game.
How could he say to this guy, Hey, dude, I just transformed America, the Mall, into the greatest massively multiplayer online game. It will support thousands of players simultaneously, and players can be on the same side or play against each other in large-scale combat simulations set in a real place. They can be me or the SWAT hero who takes me down, and I bet a surprising number choose to play me. I am creating the scenes for a new game. Rather than using computer-generated images and sounds, I will be the first to use actual pictures and sounds from actual slaughter and carnage, in a real place, in a real time, with real characters, real life, real death. The stories! The miraculous mistakes, the brave moms, the gay waiters who give up their lives to protect their customers, the teenaged killers, the dedicated if hopelessly fucked-up imam, Maahir the killer of Santa Claus, it just don’t git no better!
I believe that this will provide the realism lacking in the other games and in my world, which is the only one I care about, the only one I succeeded in, the only one where I found respect and loyalty and love and my ideal self, that is, immortality. No, it’s more: it’s god-hood. And they will understand, the generations of players who are absorbed into the culture of my creation and become its heroes and villains. So—am I crazy or what? And it’s all on disc. The finest first person shooter in history. Get the disc to WikiLeaks and it’ll astound the world. It is first person shooter as art, as The Odyssey or War and Peace. Not only did I have the imagination to conceive it, I had the will to engineer it. All before the age of twenty-five.
But the imam would have not even begun to grasp the conceit that if art was creation, then it also had to be destruction. Instead Andrew settled on a trope that seemed to satisfy most people, and in which he himself even slightly believed.
“I have always liked to wreck things,” he said, more to end the conversation than to explain anything. “It may be a drive as human as sex or greed or fear. Think about it. A certain tiny portion of the population has since time immemorial had a hunger to destroy so deep, so consistent, it has to be chromosomal. A gene for destruction. The DNA theory of anarchism. Maybe Allah or possibly the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whichever one is really behind the curtain, he seeds each generation with a few of us natural-born blowers-up-of-shit because he knows someone’s got to wreck all the crap so that someone else can start over and rebuild and have something to do on Monday. Else what would we do all day, year after year? Make cuckoo clocks?”
The imam, of course, didn’t catch the refs to Wizard or to Welles’s chilly speech in The Third Man, but he caught the gist of it.
“I think,” he said, “Allah has touched you. He just forgot to whisper his name into your ear.”
“See,” Andrew said, “everyone makes mistakes.”
EARLIER THAT DAY
The truck pulled into the sublevel loading dock for the Rio Grande corridor at 11:30 a.m. and Andrew was there to greet it. As usual the place was deserted, as the deliveries that kept America, the Mall, running came in late afternoon, between morning and evening crowds, even on Black Friday.
Andrew watched them unlimber from the truck interior, twelve Somali youths, ragged-looking and bewildered, in poor men’s clothes, Pakistani copies of designer jeans, Malaysian Men’s Club clone jackets, and Chinese-made athletic shoes; the boys were clearly overwhelmed by what they saw, which was nothing more than a large warehouse space in the mall’s dark underground, far removed from the consumerist glories of the place itself. The imam barked orders and got them quickly herded into a freight elevator, where all fourteen men, crowded together, rode to the fourth floor and found themselves in another dark tunnel that ran behind the retail outlets on the Rio Grande corridor. Andrew led the way, and a hundred or so feet later, he popped the computer lock on his store, opened the door, and admitted them to his stockroom. He had industriously cleared it out for them, so there’d be plenty of room. Moreover, six ten-piece buckets of Popeye’s fried chicken and a cooler full of Cokes awaited the jihad warriors, who—even the oldest, called Maahir—at this point seemed in a kind of sloppy daze, unsure where they were, what their mission would be, what fate lay ahead. They had been told that this was a martyr operation, about which they had no doubts, that this day would end in paradise, that even before paradise they would serve the Faith more spectacularly than Mohamed Atta and the holy nineteen of 9-11, that they would enjoy every single second of what lay ahead, and that their job was to obey Allah as represented by the will of the imam. Who the white boy was held no interest at all to them compared to the chicken, which they found delicious, as they did the Coca-Cola, though one wondered aloud, in Somali, if there was Diet Coke available and seemed disappointed when he found it was not.
The imam bade them rest. He knew the travel had been overlong and uncomfortable, and he himself was quite agitated as, unblooded, martrydom was not something a certain part of him welcomed, the part that had turned him into a chronic masturbator (three times last night!), secret imbiber, and occasional whoremonger.
What sustained him was not his faith in Allah or
his love of fallen Osama but his belief in Andrew. Andrew knew everything, had foreseen everything, was calm, decisive, kind, just, decent, and sensitive to the iron mandates of Islamic culture, particularly as regarding infidels, though he himself was an infidel. That fact could be overlooked: such a gifted boy, such a committed warrior. He loved Andrew in a way that was almost unhealthy, though of course he was not a deviant—the holy text is quite explicit on the fate of men who love men—but he saw now how such a thing was at least possible. He loved him, then, as the Arab leaders had loved Lawrence in the Great War decades ago and could give themselves to the care of an infidel, knowing that in his heart, this white man rode with the Bedu.
Andrew’s theory was to keep the boys occupied in these last few hours and far away from bigger questions of fate and duty and faith. Too much thinking was inappropriate now, so late, so close. Thus, through the stern guidance of the imam, he had three of them drag out the eleven crates of Soviet 5.45×39 ammunition, knife open the tins, rip the ammo out of the cheesy Russian military cardboard boxes, and all gather about to load the orange magazines. This was no easy task, and the boys didn’t enjoy it, but Maahir, the oldest, was rough on the loafers and commanded them to their task, even though fingers soon grew sore forcing the cartridges into the narrow slots in the magazines, through the sharp lips that abraded or even cut their skin and stiffened in resistance as the boys loaded more and thereby increased the spring pressure against which they worked. All, of course, had loaded Kalash mags before, but never in such abundance. They usually carried but two or three with them and, barring conflict, they could have those tucked into pouches for days, sometimes weeks. Now, suddenly, they were loading twenty magazines apiece, and it was not enjoyable duty, even if it portended a big killing and much glory ahead. Then, to break the misery, Saalim told a funny story about the time his goat had been hit by a lorry and he had defrauded the driver out of three times the animal’s worth. Punch-line: it wasn’t even Saalim’s goat!
Through all this, not a word was said about plans. The actualities of what lay ahead were as mysterious as ever. And time was passing. Finally, at around two o’clock, when the last of the mags had been topped off, each boy had made sure his shoes were tied tight and had visited the pail in the little room to the left and made an ablative contribution, when prayers had been said again, finally, it was time.
The imam asked the boys to separate into self-selected twosomes, and there was some unanticipated difficulty here, as Ashkir was irritated because Saalim had already teamed with Asad. For Urgaas, the idea of spending the last hours of his life on earth with Ashkir was especially annoying, but finally Maahir grabbed Ashkir as his partner, which left Urgaas to buddy up with Madino, whom, though he had nothing in common with him, Urgaas at least did not actively despise.
That done, the imam walked among them, handing out tribal scarves, which he demanded they wrap about their necks but stuff low, inside the collars of their shirts, the idea being to pull them out at the moment of action, making each boy easy to identify by the others. He also gave them radio headsets with little throat microphones, through which, during the operation, he would address them.
He bade them sit. He nodded to Andrew, who slid a blackboard in front of them and spun it on pivots to reveal a map. The smartest among them recognized it instantly as a cross section of the very structure in which they were present, as viewed from the top down. It revealed a somewhat lopsided pentagon, with the two bottom sides slightly concave. The center of this odd structure appeared to be open, though it was latticed with walkways and at each corner, a larger box bore an odd name, in English, which some could sound out as Nordstrom, Sears, Macy’s, and Bloomingdale’s. Four corridors—strangely marked Colorado, Rio Grande, Mississippi, and Hudson—led from the outermost ring to the center area.
He spoke in Somali.
“Today, my brother pilgrims, is the day we strike the beast of the West in his lair. In a few short minutes, I will release you. You will be fully armed with your guns, your knives, warriors of the Faith, here to slay and ravage and rampage as is commanded by the holy text. You will rest tonight in paradise, my pilgrims, attended by a fleet of win-some virgins, who will bring you wine and dates and carnal pleasure and glory unto eternity. Let me show you the path to glory.
“But first let me warn you. We have shielded you thus far from the seductions of the West. You were chosen for your purity, your innocence, your devotion to faith. As you move along, you will see wondrous things that only a decadent civilization can conjure, clothes and toys and foods and other trivial but colorful delights. You must be strong. You must resist. This is a day of jihad, not vacation! Moreover, you must not be tempted by the shameless flesh of the West. You will see it everywhere, and in its beguiling licentiousness, it has brought many a true believer to ruin. I have chosen you because you are strong in the mind and in the heart. You can look upon such filth and spit in disgust. You will not be tempted, swayed, weakened, or in any way turned from duty.
“And that is as follows: You will smartly progress to the elevators as marked. Your rifles, hidden under your coats, will not be visible. Your earphones are common in America and the infidels will take them for the cell phones that dominate their lives. Each team of two will take the elevator to the first level. There, each team will progress to the corridors marked by the names of rivers, Colorado, Mississippi, Hudson, and Rio Grande”—he pointed them out—“and at the given hour, as I signal, Maahir will shoot the king of the infidels atop his throne, here, and you will hear the shot, pull your scarves up over your heads, shout ‘Allahu akbar’ so that the infidels will know who has come to slay them in their sanctuary, and you will open fire, moving down the corridors toward this.”
He pointed to the intricate pattern of roadways in the center.
“This is a Western playland, full of absurd contrivances that give them the safe joy of speed. You will drive them into this area by gunfire, killing as you see fit, drive them forward into the playland, where all will commingle and halt in progress. Maahir and his three will receive them. There you will command them to sit and you will commence to guard them.
“An hour, perhaps two, will pass, while I and my friend here make demands upon the infidels to help our cause. We mean to order them to free our three brothers unjustly imprisoned, so that they too will return to glory and the West will know our unquenchable will and that no bars can ever truly imprison a jihadi warrior prince.”
At last it was time for the guns.
Andrew had checked each for functionality and distributed them with confidence. For the young men, new guns were like an aphrodisiac to the sex of violence. They crowded in, hungrily, to touch, to hold, to caress, to possess a new weapon. The usual orgy of rifle love took place, as each newly equipped and wide-eyed gunman tested bolt and trigger pull and sight alignment and heft and feel and pointability. Some of the more immature aimed, issued copious, phlegmy machine-gun sounds, and mimed the shaking of the instrument on full automatic, as deployed in fantasy genocide against Jews or, if Jews weren’t available, mere infidels, equally worthy of death but somehow lacking in the pizzazz of a Jewish kill.
“Yes,” said the imam, “it is play now, but soon, my young, fearless jihadis, it will be real, as will the blood that you spill, including, in martyrdom, your own as you make the trip to be loved by Allah.”
“Allahu akbar!” someone shouted, and the others took it up, until it grew alarmingly loud, and Andrew elbowed the enthusiastic imam, and that gentleman came to his senses and ordered silence.
The young men drew a single orange banana clip from the pouch they wore on their chest and now pivoted it into the well of the AK-74, almost in perfect syncopation, as if on drill, so that the sound of twelve clicks snapped through the space. To some ears, it was music.
Finally, each of the young men was handed a large overgarment, cheap blue gabardine overcoats formerly issued to Czech draftees that had been picked up by Andrew, XXXL, at a
local surplus joint. They were easily big enough to swallow the young men and the rifles they held cradled tight across their chests or down along their sides, hands nesting on pistol grips. To look at them in this condition was to see little that suggested lethal intent: young Somali men, each handsome in that Somali way of which Somalis were so justly proud, with high, fine cheekbones, chocolate skin, a fine pelt of frizzed hair, and bright and vivid eyes, each wrapped in some garment indistinguishable from the garments worn by others of the age and cohort, Somali or whatever, pretty much the world over.
“When the Kaafi brothers are released,” the imam concluded, “then you will have your killing. No one will interrupt you, as the infidels are cowards. If they cannot bomb from afar or fire missiles, they lack the will to fight. They do not like the sight of blood or the damage a bullet may do. But you, my young lions, are hardened in battle. The destruction to flesh which you bring to them, the lakes of blood you spill until it is thick upon the floor, all of that is your contribution to the Faith and the vessel of your glory. You will avenge Osama!”
Asad thought, Who was Osama?
7:55 P.M.–8:01 P.M.
Any reports from the mall?” asked Colonel Obobo, himself bathed in the glow of the TV monitor in the dark of the Incident Command trailer, as the same imagery of loading, sealing, and then taxiing was playing out.
“All quiet, sir.”
“Great,” said the colonel.
Then he felt a presence; it was Mr. Renfro leaning in quietly.
“I haven’t seen Jefferson lately,” whispered Mr. Renfro. “I don’t trust him. Maybe he’s up to something crazy. Better check on him.”