Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(61)

The boy cocked his gaze across the aisle, toward the sleeping form of his parents, who were resting against each other under a single blanket. “My dad hates his job.”

“That’s too bad.”

“He makes a lot of money, but he hates it. I hear him talking to my mom sometimes.”

“Probably because he doesn’t believe in what he does.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Al-Aziz began paying more attention to the game of checkers. He found himself losing badly. “A man must believe. It’s where the love of one’s work, one’s duty, comes from.”

He began studying the board, seeking a strategy to seize the advantage from the boy, who’d already jumped five of his pieces and was marching unchecked across al-Aziz’s side.

“I don’t know what that means, either.”

Al-Aziz’s first kill had been when he was just a bit older, a few years after he sabotaged the bus. It was a young woman his own age who refused to wear a veil, calling herself secular. Totally acceptable, as was her promiscuousness, in Western-leaning Turkey, but not to him. So, one night he pretended to give in to her overtures, leaving her in the woods to die after he bashed her skull in with a rock. At that point, it was the greatest moment of al-Aziz’s life.

He’d been fifteen at the time, twenty years ago now, when no one had dared to contemplate the existence of the Islamic State to which he’d dedicated his life—first as a soldier, then quickly rising through the ranks as the group formed its hierarchy and system of succession on the fly. His fluency in several languages made him a great asset, and his penchant for violence fueled his even faster rise. Today, many believed that what the world knew as ISIS was on the run, both its numbers and its influence declining. But members of the cadre, like al-Aziz, knew the group was just biding its time, picking its spots, lying in wait for the right moment to make its impact felt in a way that would secure its legacy and service to Allah forever.

And now, that moment had come.

“King me!” the boy pronounced, as al-Aziz realized that winning the game was impossible.

This game, anyway, he thought, as he kinged the boy. Back in Syria, he trained boys of this age to behead men kneeling at their feet. How to handle the heaviness of the sword and turn its weight in their favor. The angle, the aim, the cut—it was all about technique.

“I could teach you how to play better,” the boy was telling him, as if he honestly felt bad. “So you could win.”

“I could do the same for you.” Al-Aziz smiled.

Perplexed, the boy looked at the game board, which showed him far ahead. “But I’m already winning.”

“There are other games.”

Al-Aziz gazed across the aisle and pictured this boy slicing off the heads of his parents and siblings as they slept. In his experience, that was a great test, revealing a young warrior’s true mettle and level of loyalty to the caliphate. He must renounce everything in the past so that he might turn toward the future unencumbered. Al-Aziz genuinely believed he was doing these boys a favor. The process had yielded ISIS some of its finest young warriors.

“Mister…,” the kid was saying.

Al-Aziz gazed about the plane. The majority of passengers were sleeping now. He wondered how many heads he could take before anyone stirred. Imagined them cowering before his masked form, his sword splattered with blood, which had splashed the walls and windows of the plane as well.

“Hey, mister.”

They wouldn’t fight back because they were sheep. In killing them, al-Aziz would be performing a service, ridding the world of their burden. They served nothing and no one, did not understand the vision for the world as expressed by the one true God al-Aziz existed merely to serve. Al-Aziz wouldn’t rest until that day had come to pass. The power and efficacy of his beliefs was about to be more righteously rewarded than even the caliphate’s supreme leaders had dared to foresee.

“Mister…”

They would bring their greatest enemy to its knees, al-Aziz himself now responsible for wielding a sword that could slaughter millions instead of one. A great gift, bestowed by Allah Himself, in recognition of al-Aziz’s devotion to the word of the one true God, a devotion that wouldn’t cease or even abate until all the nonbelievers were gone. Nine others were accompanying him on this blessed mission, all taking other flights, on other airlines, to different cities, en route to their rendezvous a day later. Nine others, to bring the total to ten, the same number the prophet Muhammad himself had killed when he conquered Mecca. A holy number.

Ten.

“Mister!”

Al-Aziz finally turned back the boy’s way.

“It’s your move, mister,” he said.

Al-Aziz smiled. “Yes, it is.”





PART SIX

Cattlemen and ranchers went to war over the practice of stringing barbed wire around plots of land. Bands of armed “nippers” worked at night cutting the barbed wire, causing an estimated $20 million in damage. The Texas Rangers were called in on patrol. Ranger Ira Aten proposed arming the fences with bombs triggered to explode when the fence wire was cut. The idea was nixed. (September 1, 1883)



—Bullock Texas State History Museum, “The Story of Texas”





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