mountainous perch. The ground was hard and wet beneath his thin-soled boots, but
the Stone Palace—or, more precisely, its main entrance—glowed before him. The
east wall was a vast expanse of limestone, its weathered stones and wide,
freshly painted gate bathed in lights that were sunk into the ground every few
feet. It shimmered. It beckoned.
“You or your followers may die tonight,” the Caliph had told the members of his
command hours before. “If so, your martyrdom will be remembered—always! Your
children and your parents will be sanctified by their connection to you. Shrines
will be built to your memory! Pilgrims will travel to the site of your birth!
You will be remembered and venerated, always, as among the fathers of our
nation.”
They were individuals of faith, fervor, and courage, whom the West was pleased
to scorn as terrorists. Terrorists! For the West, the ultimate source of terror
in the world, this term was a cynical convenience. The Caliph despised the
Anuran tyrants, but he hated with a pure hate the Westerners who made their rule
possible. The Anurans at least understood that there was a price to be paid for
their usurpation of power; the rebels had repeatedly brought that lesson home,
written it with blood. But the Westerners were accustomed to acting with
impunity. Perhaps that would change.
Now the Caliph looked at the hillside around him and felt hope—not merely for
himself and his followers but for the island itself. Anura. Once it had taken
back its own destiny, what would it not be capable of? The very rocks and trees
and vine-draped hillocks seemed to urge him on.
Mother Anura would vindicate her protectors.
Centuries ago, visitors had to resort to the cadence of poetry in order to evoke
the beauty of its flora and fauna. Soon colonialism, fueled by envy and avarice,
would impose its grim logic: what was ravishing would be ravished, the
captivating made captive. Anura became a prize for which the great maritime
empires of the West would contend. Battlements rose above the spice-tree groves;
cannonballs nestled on the beaches among the conch shells. The West brought
bloodshed to the island and it took root there, spreading across the landscape
like a toxic weed, nourished on injustice.
What did they do to you, Mother Anura?
Over tea and canapes, Western diplomats drew lines that would bring tumult to
the lives of millions, treating the atlas of the world like a child’s
Etch-A-Sketch.
Independence, they had called it! It was one of the great lies of the twentieth
century. The regime itself amounted to an act of violence against the Kagama
people, for which the only remedy was more violence. Every time a suicide bomber
took out a Hindu government minister, the Western media pontificated about
“senseless killings,” but the Caliph and his soldiers knew that nothing made
more sense. The most widely publicized wave of bombings—taking out ostensibly
civilian targets in the capital city, Caligo—had been masterminded by the Caliph
himself. The vans were rendered invisible, for all intents, by the forged decals
of a ubiquitous international courier and freight service. Such a simple
deception! Packed with diesel-soaked nitrate fertilizer, the vans delivered only
a cargo of death. In the past decade, this wave of bombings was what aroused the
greatest condemnation around the world—which was an odd hypocrisy, for it merely
brought the war home to the warmongers.
Now the chief radio operator whispered in the Caliph’s ear. The Kaffra base had
been destroyed, its communications infrastructure dismantled. Even if they
managed to get the word out, the guards at the Stone Palace had no hope for
backup. Thirty seconds later, the radio operator had yet another message to
convey: confirmation that a second army base had been reclaimed by the people. A
second thoroughfare was now theirs. The Caliph felt his spine begin to tingle.
Within hours, the entire province of Kenna would be wrested from a despotic
death grip. The shift of power would begin. National liberation would glimmer
over the horizon with the sun.
Nothing, however, was more important than taking the Steenpaleis, the Stone
Palace. Nothing. The Go-Between had been emphatic about it, and so far the
Go-Between had been right about everything, starting with the value of his own
contributions. He had been as good as his word—no, better. He had been generous
to the point of profligacy with his armaments and, equally important, his
intelligence. He had not disappointed the Caliph, and the Caliph would not
disappoint him. The Caliph’s opponents had their resources, their backers and
benefactors; why should he not have his?
“It’s still cold!” Arjun cried out with delight as he picked up the beer can.
The outside of the can was actually frosty. Arjun pressed it to the side of his
face, moaning with pleasure. His fingers melted oval impressions in the icy
coating, which glinted cheerily in the checkpoint’s yellow mercury light.
“And it’s really full?” Shyam said doubtfully.
“Unopened,” Arjun said. “Heavy with the health drink!” And it was heavy,
unexpectedly so. “We’ll pour off a swig for the ancestors. A few long swallows
for me, and whatever drops are left for you, since I know you don’t like the
stuff.” Arjun’s thick fingers scrabbled for the pull tab, then gave it a firm
yank.
The muffled pop of the detonator, like the sound of a party favor that spews
confetti, came milliseconds before the actual explosion. It was almost enough
time for Arjun to register the thought that he had been the victim of a small
prank and for Shyam to register the thought that his suspicions—although they
had remained at the not-quite-conscious level of vague disquiet—had been
justified. When the twelve ounces of plas-tique exploded, both men’s trains of
thought came to an end.
The blast was a shattering moment of light and sound that instantly expanded
into an immense, fiery oval of destruction. The shock waves destroyed the two
knife rests and the wooden roadside booth, as well as the barracks and those who
slept there. The pair of guards who were supposed to have been on duty as
backstop at the other end of the roadblock died before they awoke. The intense,
momentary heat caused an area of the red laterite soil to crust into an
obsidian-like glass. And then, as quickly as it arrived, the explosion—the
deafening noise, the blinding light—vanished, like a man’s fist when he opens
his hand. The force of destruction was fleeting, the destruction itself
permanent.
Fifteen minutes later, when a convoy of canvas-topped personnel carriers made
its way through what remained of the checkpoint, no subterfuge would be
necessary.
There was an irony, the Caliph realized, in the fact that only his adversaries
would fully understand the ingenuity of the predawn onslaught. On the ground,
the fog of war would obscure what would be obvious from far away: the pattern of
precisely coordinated attacks. The Caliph knew that within a day or so, analysts
at the American spy agencies would be peering at satellite imagery that would
make the pattern of activity as clear as a textbook diagram. The Caliph’s
victory would become the stuff of legend; his debt to the Go-Between—not least
at the insistence of the Go-Between himself—would remain a matter between him
and Allah.
A pair of binoculars was brought to the Caliph, who surveyed the honor guards
arrayed before the main gate.
They were human ornaments, an accordion of paper dolls. Another instance of the
government’s elitist stupidity. The compound’s nighttime illumination rendered
them sitting ducks while simultaneously impeding their ability to see anything
in the surrounding darkness.
The honor guards represented the ARAs elite—typically, those with relatives in
high places, mannerly careerists with excellent hygiene and a knack for
maintaining the crease in their neatly pressed uniforms. The créme de la créme
brulée, the Caliph reflected to himself with a mixture of irony and contempt.
They were showmen, not warriors. Through the binoculars, he gazed at the seven
men, each holding a rifle braced upright on his shoulder, where it would look
impressive and be perfectly useless. Not even showmen. Playthings.
The chief radio operator nodded at the Caliph: the section commander was in
position, ensuring that the barracked soldiers would be undeployable. A member
of the Caliph’s retinue presented him with a rifle: it was a purely ceremonial
act that he had devised, but ceremony was the handmaiden of power. Accordingly,
the Caliph would fire the first shot, using the very same rifle that a great
independence fighter had used, fifty years ago, to assassinate the Dutch
governor general. The rifle, a bolt-action Mauser M24, had been perfectly
reconditioned and carefully zeroed. Unwrapped from the silk that had enfolded
it, it gleamed like the sword of Saladin.
The Caliph found the number one guard in the weapon’s scope and exhaled halfway
so that the crosshairs settled on the center of the man’s beribboned chest. He
squeezed the trigger and intently watched the man’s expressions—successively