Mohammad ibn Mohammad al Islam sat by the window in his room, looking out at the crumbling structure across the street. He was a patient man, a cunning man, and his talents had helped him rise quickly through the ranks of Daesh. It helped that he had been born in Connecticut as James Beckworth III, and attended Harvard.
He had taken his post-graduate trust fund from his parents and immediately set off to France for what he said would be a well-deserved celebration of his accomplishment. However, shortly thereafter, he made contact with recruiters from Daesh who helped him realize his dream of bringing death to America for all the evils it wrought on the world. Oh, America had its minor advantages, like allowing people to acquire enough wealth to send their children to Ivy League schools. But it also oppressed countries that stood for all the things James Beckworth III—now Mohammad ibn Mohammad al Islam—believed in, such as bedding 14-year-old girls and executing gays. America had to be taken out of the way.
In between filming videos for Daesh (because his voice was strident and his vocabulary erudite), he trained with weapons until he was adequate with a pistol. More than adequate, in fact: his years as a youth spent shooting skeet with his father at the country club had honed his eye. He had only needed to overcome the reluctance to pull the trigger when the target was a human being.
He remembered the first time. It took him three minutes, and then they told him the victim was gay. He still felt a rush when he thought about the way the blood flowed out of the eyes and nostrils after the bullet went up through the chin, like a crimson fountain.
Now he had the opportunity to prove the superiority of Daesh to an upstart insurgent movement that had broken away from the fold. The ya Homaar were negligible for a long time, but recently they had managed to get their hands on some explosive technology that was well beyond their own means to create or control. These weapons would be put to much better use in the hands of the skilled freedom fighters of Daesh. Through friends of friends, made friendlier at the muzzle of a gun, James Beckworth III/ Mohammad ibn Mohammad al Islam and his compatriots had been led to this group in this dusty little hovel in Syria.
He had monitored the comings and goings of this group of ya Homaar associates until he was comfortable with their patterns. One simply couldn’t barge in to a situation like this. One had to know one’s enemy, know their patterns, and then put that knowledge to use. This is what gave him the advantage over the ya Homaar fools. This would be the day he would truly show Daesh his worth as a soldier.
· · ·
In a crumbling three-story apartment building across the street from ya Homaar’s Syrian hideout, catty-corner from the window from which Beckworth oiled his weapon, Avital Avraham, traveling under the name Amira Abramovitz, plopped her suitcase onto the foot of the full-sized bed, causing a plume of dust to erupt from the thin comforter. Unlike the way she had dressed in Jersey—flowing dresses with hair fashionably loose over her shoulders—she now wore some faded jeans and a white blouse tied off at the waist. Her hair was braided tightly to her head, and she glistened with sweat.
Remo, still traveling as Remo Robespierre, paced the room impatiently like a caged panther. He had traveled with a small duffel that carried only a change of khakis and a rolled up black t-shirt, which he had carelessly tossed into a chair too uncomfortable to be used for sitting.
“So which room are the Yahoo Martians holed up in?” he asked.
Avital wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, noticing that Remo didn’t perspire in the slightest. Just another enigma about this CIA man she had stumbled into that she would worry about another day. Despite his seemingly nervous pacing, Avital saw that his breathing remained calm. It was the most self-possessed, controlled nervous pacing she had ever seen.
“They don’t have one,” she said.
He stopped. “They’re not here? Then why are we?”
“They’re not in this building,” she emphasized. “They’re in the building across the street. We’re perfectly positioned to watch their comings and goings, establish their patterns of behavior and…”
The door clicked shut, and Avital realized she was alone.
“Oh no,” she said. “He wouldn’t.”
· · ·
As James Beckworth III made a note about the last ya Homaar soldier to enter the building (making special attention to his rather effeminate gait), he looked up just in time to see a slender American in chinos stride purposefully across the street, in a straight line toward the ya Homaar safehouse. About fifty yards behind him, a woman in jeans rushed out of the building behind him, calling something out to him.
This stupid idiot was going to ruin everything—all his careful planning and waiting. Cursing, Beckworth grabbed his semi-automatic rifle and rushed out into the hallway, down the stairs, and out of the building, just in time to see the door to the ya Homaar hideout swing shut on a broken hinge.
· · ·
The interior of the ya Homaar hole was a crumbling, dimly-lit room with half-broken furniture—moreso now that Remo had crumpled one of the wooden support columns by means of an introduction.
“Okay, who wants to tell me where the bombs are coming from?” Remo asked, brushing the wood splinters from his palm. “I know none of you here are smart enough to build them. Tell me where to find your supplier, or I may get angry.” The five men inside were agape at having seen this crazy American burst through their locked door and squeeze the supporting 4-by-4 like it was a toilet paper tube. One had the presence of mind to reach for the weapon on the table. Then his mind made its presence known in two gushing streams of blood and vitreous humour from the sockets his eyeballs had occupied just prior to Remo’s fingers popping them.
“Bombs,” Remo said again to the room of four statues. “El biggo kaboomo,” he added, realizing the men in the room didn’t understand plain English.
“Qonbelah!” Remo turned at the voice and saw Avital picking her way over the broken support beam. “Qonbelah razzaq!”
The men obviously understood her. Remo hooked a thumb in her direction. “What she said,” he added, his eyes glinting menacingly from deep underneath his brow. Remo didn’t understand the plaintive wailing, but got the hand gestures well enough to know they were pleading ignorance. Then he spied the backpack in the back of the room, set up against the corner. He pointed his chin at it. “You think there’ll be a ‘Property of’ sticker anywhere in that?” he asked Avital.
She followed his gaze. “Only one way to find out,” she said. But as she moved toward the device, one of the men made a desperate lunge toward the table, slapping his hand on a boxlike remote, clearly intending to detonate the evidence, and all of them with it.
Nothing happened.
“Looks like you bought a dud, dead man,” Remo said. His arm flicked out to the hand that held the remote, the fingertips brushing across the trapezium and powdering it against the scaphoid, rendering the man’s thumb useless and infusing his forearm with an intense jolt of pain.
In the corner, hastened by panic at the attempted detonation, Avital had lifted the device out of the backpack and had slid a panel off the back of the device. “I wouldn’t be too sure,” she said. She tilted the device toward Remo so he could see the innards of the device, surrounding a small and unassuming digital display that was clearly active and counting down. The display showed three hours, twelve minutes, and seven seconds.
“Think you can disarm it in time?” Remo asked.
“Three hours might as well be forever,” she said.
“Three hours is indeed plenty of time,” said a voice from behind Remo. The voice was followed by a small click, and Remo felt the rushing pressure waves of the advancing bullet. He turned slightly, and the bullet passed harmlessly over his shoulder. Harmlessly to Remo, at least. It passed not so harmlessly through the forehead of the ya Homaar insurgent whose collar Remo was still gripping in one hand, snapping his neck back and spraying the floor behind him with flecks of red and gray.
“Finally, someone I can talk to,” said Remo. He dropped the dead terrorist and seemed to materialize in front of the English speaking gunman, walking through two more bullets that could not have possibly missed at such range. The three remaining ya Homaar agents cowered behind a table, covering their eyes with their hands as Remo reached for the rifle. “Satan,” one of them whispered as he observed an unharmed Remo disassemble the gun into unusable metal pieces of scrap.
James Beckworth III squeezed his finger on a trigger that suddenly wasn’t there, before his knees were driven to the concrete floor. Remo’s left hand squeezed his shoulder in a vise-like grip, sending screaming pain throughout his deltoid muscle. “Now what’s a good American boy like you doing with a pond scum outfit like this?”
Grunting with pain, the young man tried to deliver a defiant “Death to America” as he had been trained, but a strangled cry was all he could manage until Remo let up the pressure on his nerve cluster.
“Never mind,” Remo said. “Why don’t you just tell me where you boys are getting these bombs? Because there’s no way any of you are smart enough to be making them yourselves.”
James Beckworth III gasped for breath. “I don’t know,” he whimpered, sounding much more now like an injured American child than an immortal freedom fighter. “I’m not with these wannabes. I’m Daesh!” He said the last bit with what he hoped sounded like pride. “I came to take their weapons, same as you.”
Remo shook his head. “Not the same as me,” he said, renewing his pressure on the nerve cluster and sending the man back to a dimension of blinding pain. “How you doing on defusing that thing, sweetheart?” he called back to Avital.
“Uhm, hello?” she said. She waggled her fingers in the air. “I can slide a panel off the side, but I didn’t know I needed to bring a toolkit when you ran off to barge in blindly.”
Remo nodded. “Fine, we’ll bring it with us,” he said. “Just give me a minute here to clean up.” He pulled Beckworth in close by the collar of his shirt. “What did Daesh plan to use the bombs for?”
Beckworth stuck his chin out in defiance. Remo pushed it back in, erasing the investment Beckworth’s parents had put into expensive orthodontics. “We’re taking this bomb apart,” Remo growled. “Talk, or we’ll take you apart next.” To emphasize his point, Remo’s hand whipped past Beckworth’s head, then dangled a bloody pale flap that Beckworth realized was his left ear. A searing pain enveloped the side of his head.
He talked. Remo listened, memorizing every detail of every plan to pass along to Smitty later.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Remo said. The ball of his right palm caught Beckworth across the left side of the forehead, denting it in like the shell of a hardboiled egg and sending bone fragments into his frontal lobe. His eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed to the ground as Remo turned to the remaining ya Homaar with a tight, humorless grin.
As the dying men’s screams escaped into the street, a returning ya Homaar insurgent saw the broken door frame and had the rare insight not to enter through it. He peeked through the window in time to see a slim white man dropping his brothers’ lifeless bodies to the floor while a dark-haired woman was zipping up the backpack with their bomb in it. He backed away from the window and hurried down the street before taking out his phone and placing a call to report what he had witnessed.
· · ·
The wilderness area was completely barren, and so remote that it took almost a week to reach civilization. There were buildings here, erected by men who came to study why the wilderness area was completely barren and who had ultimately decided that living a week away from the site was preferable to solving the mystery. The new occupants had surrounded the place with layers of electrified fencing, and hired a small army of Russian security officers to guard the place.
Less than ten miles from the outpost, Uri Kotov sat in a wooden shack that did little to keep the whistling wind from entering the shelter. His rifle sat propped up against one wall and he read the magazine he had with him for the fifteenth time. It never got old, perhaps because it was crowded with pictures of naked females in inviting poses.
Uri’s partner, Boris Osin, reclined in his chair, snoring loudly, giving Uri the freedom to enjoy his magazine in peace.
As Uri’s mind concocted a scenario where he was entering the room to join with the platinum blonde with the large breasts who lay atop the polar bear rug, a new sound penetrated his fantasy—a high pitched, rapid beeping. Uri glanced at the device on the single desk the two men shared and saw the green light on it blinking. It had never blinked before, and never beeped. Uri slid the magazine back into the bottom drawer of the desk and nudged Boris awake.
“What do we do?” he asked.
Boris grunted. “Nothing yet,” he replied. “We wait first.”
The beeping and flashing synchronized and became more rapid until the light was a flicker and the sound was a constant sine wave. Then, a thousand yards outside their window, the small knapsack-sized bomb exploded in a fireball of light and fury.
When the rumbling subsided, Boris pulled himself out of his chair with another grunt. “I think we do something now,” he said, shouldering his rifle.
“Do what? Where are you going?” Uri asked, standing to join his comrade.
“Is not difficult,” Boris replied. “When bomb explodes, drive jeep to shed and get another one. Put new one where old one was. Do this before hour, hour and a half, go by.” He shook his head. “Are small bombs. Seem useless,” he mused.
“I remember the training,” the younger man said defensively. “It’s just never happened before.” He reached for his own rifle, planning to accompany his partner. Boris waved him back.
“Stay,” he said. “Is small bomb. Is long drive. I go. You stay here with photo book of American whores.” Uri blushed hotly, but Boris didn’t seem to care as he stepped out into the freezing wind. Moments later, Uri heard the jeep crank over then drive off.
Uri re-opened the bottom drawer of the desk. He had at least an hour all to himself.