Near Iria, southern Syria
It was the same dream. He’d had it for years, he’d have it forever. Allah would not intercede. Allah had commanded it, and for a purpose: it kept him smart, scared, aware. And it reminded him of the hard reality of the world he had chosen to occupy and the price that he’d have to pay to dominate it.
In this dream, he crouched in the rubble. He imagined Americans in front of him. He imagined his Dragunov against his shoulder, braced solid against wall or fallen column or automobile fender, his eye to the reticle, his hand to the grip, the butt against the shoulder.
He had been thus many times. He imagined the scurry and twist of the Americans. The helmets were turtle-shaped, sand-colored, flanged to protect the back of the neck. They wore so much gear, it was a miracle they could even move. They looked like Crusaders, lacking only the flapping white tunics emblazoned with the Templar cross. In their armor, and with rucksacks and an abundance of weapons, they seemed to be a new crusade, and, in the way his mind worked, it wasn’t hard to go from there to cities in flame, men burned at the stake, mosques desecrated, women raped, towns pillaged, despair everywhere in the land of Muhammad. All that had happened ten centuries ago meant nothing. Time was meaningless; there was no “then,” as there was no “now.”
The rifle was marvelous to his practiced touch. No tremble afflicted the chevron that dominated the center of the broad encirclement of his scope image. He put the point of the chevron where it had to be, gauging distance, adjusting the hold up a bit, down a bit, perhaps a bit to the right or left if heavy winds blew sand across the lens. Then the squeeze, almost automatic at this point, as the trigger resisted him slightly as he pressed it back, toward himself. No torque, no twist, the regularity of a robot’s press, and the gun issued death in the form of Bulgarian heavy ball, which to Juba felt like a bit of smash to the shoulder and looked like a blur. Followed by the recovery of the system as it fell back to steadiness after its adventure in recoil.
Each one reacted differently when hit. You could never tell what was going to happen. Some went instantly still, some fought against the penetration of the bullet—that is, the penetration of death itself. Some manifested fury, some resignation, some even relief, as they went down into eternal sleep.
In this dream, the world was rich with targets, even if in the real world it was seldom so. Marines crouched everywhere, rigid with fear, trying to find cover, twisting their bodies into cracks and fissures in the rubble, trying to insert themselves into doorways or vehicles, anything to get away from the anger of the sniper. But the world was a kill box. His finger spoke for God. It nursed a bolt of heavy ball from the Dragunov without upset to the reticle image in which the infidel was pinned atop the chevron. He had lost track of how many times he’d sent infidels on their voyage to wherever Allah sent them.
But, every time, the dream turned. Each time, he encountered his own fate. As he sought targets, he came at last to settle on one sunk in shadow, not quite clear. He paused a fatal second, waiting for smoke to clear, and as the wind took it and spread it thin, he saw exactly what he knew he would see in life someday: a man, such as himself, hunched calmly behind the stock of a scoped rifle, its muzzle supported and, hence, stilled by the double vectors of a bipod. At that moment, the flash, a smear of disorganized radiance, lasting but a fraction of a second as the cartridge’s unburned powder consumed itself. He knew he was doomed.
O Allah, hear me. I have served you with all my being and spirit and request humbly absolution for my sins and a welcome to Paradise.
He knew that’s how he would die. Sooner or later, having been hunted his whole life, first by Israelis and then by Iranians and then by Kurds and then by Russians and then by Israelis again and finally by Americans, he would become the trophy to a man as skilled as himself.
He jerked awake—as always—in sweat, fighting panic. The desert night was calm. He rolled from the bed and went to the window to see the broad, empty plain outside. Far off, a light burned, a police station on the other side of the valley. Downstairs, his guards were quiet, though one of them was purportedly on duty. No point in checking, as nothing would happen today.
But his mind wouldn’t settle down. Perhaps what lay before him had him unsettled—it still happened, even after so many years—and his biology was responding. No prayer could still it. He thought of a pipe of hashish, but that left him logy and imprecise in the morning.
Instead, he focused on his moment of glory. It was a gift from God. It was Allah sending him recompense for all that had been taken from him, for the humiliations and the disgrace and the echoes of a pain that never went away.
He thought of the bus.