CALIPHATE(105)

And isn't that just like the boy? thought the armorer. When he could be here, enjoying the warmth of the women, instead he's out on a cold night looking for ways to make of our company better men. A fine lad, that he is.

The first sergeant stopped by Sig's booth, a young houri in each arm, and said, "Not too much of that, you hear, Sig?"

"Never fear about me, Baseski. I never take more than Allah is likely to forgive me for."





Interlude


Nuremberg, Federal Republic of Germany,

11 September, 2016


A glass of a clear liquor grasped in one hand, Gabi switched channels from one covering a Moslem march in Paris to another showing a similar celebration in Berlin. Ghastly, she thought. Simply ghastly to be celebrating the murders of four million people. What kinds of terrible oppression must those poor people have suffered to make them so vindictive?

It was all too distasteful. Gabi switched channels yet again, this time to CNN International. That was, in its way, far worse.

The big story on CNN was the rise of a new political party in the United States, Pat Buckman's new Wake Up, America Party was sucking voters and contributors from the Republicans and Democrats like the Sahara would suck moisture from a sponge. Worse, senators, congressmen, and state governors were likewise defecting. CNN's commentators were actually concerned that the lunatic might win the election in a couple of months. And that just doesn't bear thinking about.

Whether it bore thinking about or not, though, Gabi couldn't quite tear her eyes from the screen nor switch channels yet again. Why? Because the image was one remarkably frightening to the modern German soul. There was a march there, too. Instead of disarmed rabble chanting slogans, however, this march showed thousands of armed, disciplined men and women, in ranks, under what appeared to be their old officers and NCOs. They sang as they marched, past the old Iwo Jima Memorial, over the bridge across the Potomac, and on into Washington in complete violation of that city's ordinances.

And the police did nothing, so said the commentators. How can that be? Gabi wondered. Don't they know, haven't they learned from our history, what that means?

CNN said there were other marches taking place in the United States. None of those were in Boston, Los Angeles, or Kansas City, of course. Those cities had ceased to exist. But in Houston? In Chicago? In Nashville and Atlanta and a score or more others? Men and women marched and sang and chanted for revenge.





9 November, 2016


When the returns came in from Massachusetts, neither Gabi nor the commentators were all that worried. With a sixth of the state's population—and the most liberal sixth at that—killed in the Boston bombing, it was only to be expected that there would be a serious swing to the right from those who remained. And besides, Massachusetts only had twelve electoral votes. (It would be fewer in coming years, so said the press, after the losses from the bombing came out of the official census.)

Still, Gabi had gone to bed with a sense of dread in her heart. California's fifty-five votes could not be known in Europe until the next morning. When she turned on the television that next morning to see the final results, her heart sank like a stone. Not only was that lunatic, Buckman, about to become President of the United States, he was doing so after carrying every state. Red State-Blue State: all wanted revenge. This had never been done since the uncontested election of George Washington, two hundred and twenty-seven years before. What a President might do with that kind of mandate was a frightening prospect. What this particular President would do was altogether terrifying.





1 September, 2019


Gabi had been surprised, along with nearly everyone else, when the Americans didn't attack the Moslem world within days of

Buckman's inauguration. As years had passed, the world, outraged at Buckman's invasion of civil liberties within the United States, had forgotten about their earlier fears.

Then had come his request for a declaration of war and his ultimatum to the Moslem world.

And then, ten days later, the missiles had flown.





Chapter Sixteen




It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden—if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them—as well as to cut down his trees, to raze his cities, in a word, to do everything that might ruin and discourage him, provided that the imam (i.e. the religious "guide" of the community of believers) deems these measures appropriate, suited to hastening the Islamization of that enemy or to weakening him. Indeed, all this contributes to a military triumph over him or to forcing him to capitulate.

—Ibn Hudayl,

fourteenth-century Granadan theorist on the subject of jihad