True Allegiance

Ashammi, to Brett’s surprise, laughed uproariously, clapped his hands in delight. “Oh, you Americans, you don’t understand at all. You’re delightfully out of touch—I mean delightfully until you start dropping incendiaries on our children. You spend your lives fat and happy, eating at McDonald’s, imagining yourselves superior because you have clean shopping malls and manicured front lawns. But while you sleep, while you watch your reality television, your children abandon you, no matter how many Patriot missiles you send against us, no matter how many American troops we have to bury in the sand.

“You see, we offer something you do not: a reason to die. We need not frighten anyone. You do the frightening. Because, you see, people are not frightened to die or to be killed, down deep. Down deep, they are afraid of dying without that death meaning anything. They are afraid that they will die and that a life of playing Xbox and watching your American movies and eating your American food and worshipping themselves will end with them in the ground, and their lives forgotten.

“And, of course, they are right. Their lives are meaningless.”

Brett scoffed. “And yours, I suppose, are meaningful. Slaughtering women and children.”

Ashammi grabbed Brett by his face, squeezing his jaw until it hurt. Brett clenched his teeth and stared into his eyes. “We will do anything for Allah. That is our strength, and your weakness.”

Brett whispered, “There you’re wrong. You don’t know me, and you don’t know my countrymen. We live for something. We live to kill bastards like you.”

Ashammi laughed. “No, that I know, General Hawthorne. At least those of you left.” He turned to his goons. “Take him to his cell.”

The men seized him by his arms, pulled him to his feet. As they dragged him out of the room, he got a glimpse through a window, just a crack: the Azadi Tower, growing from the ground like a thick-rooted tree, culminating in a latticework tower. Brett suppressed a grin of satisfaction. He knew exactly where he was from the coordinates on Feldkauf’s map. And he knew exactly what he had to do about it. And he’d heard Ashammi’s one word: “Tomorrow.”

He hoped his message would get to America in time.

They came for him in the middle of the night, the better to keep him off-balance. He’d been trained for such techniques, but too long ago to matter, and he’d awoken groggy, head pounding, nauseated by the casual beating handed out to him by one of Ashammi’s lackeys. No marks to the face, of course—they wanted their victims looking clean and fresh before they sawed off their heads. But the big bearded kid had worked his torso over pretty well, and ground the bones of his arm against one another to boot. Yusuf, he’d heard one of the others call him. He wouldn’t forget that anytime soon. Every time Yusuf had balled up his fist and driven it into his midsection, Brett had pictured cracking the lug across the head with a two-by-four.

They’d taken his uniform from him, forced him to dress in an orange jumpsuit, the uniform of their victims. When he’d gone to the bucket that served as a toilet, he’d noticed his urine had turned red. “Like Ali,” he’d thought to himself, “after the Thrilla.” But Ali had survived that.

This, Brett knew, he would not survive.

That wasn’t his plan.

He’d formed the plan after seeing the Azadi Tower, gauging the distance from it, realizing that Feldkauf had given him the exact coordinates of the site. He needed them to release one of their typical terror tapes for it to work, but he thought they’d do that—they couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t stop from parading him on all the news networks. That was their triumph. They wouldn’t win by fighting big battles, but by drawing recruits with the tapes.

He just hoped that the boys in intelligence picked up on the message he’d be sending. And he prayed that the film editor, or whatever cave dweller familiar with Windows Movie Maker they’d be using for this particular production, didn’t chop up the film too badly.

Yusuf and one of his companions laughed and joked as they kicked him awake, grabbed him by the arms, pulled him down the dark hallway. He could see fluorescent lights shining through the cracks of the door before he got there; a ray of light caught the edge of Ibrahim’s knife, which he carried on his belt. Yusuf looked down at him and, in his broken English, guffawed, “You be in movie now. Like movie star.”

Brett muttered through gritted teeth, “Fuck you and your mother.” Yusuf smiled. Brett smiled back. “Also, your goat,” he added.

The door at the end of the hallway swung open. Waiting before a green flag sat Ashammi, his face bared. Normally in these videos, Brett knew, the terrorists liked to swath their faces in black scarves to prevent identification. For the jihad video of a major American general, Ashammi wanted to take personal credit. Yusuf and his buddy deposited Brett next to Ashammi, on his knees.