The Reykjavik Assignment (Yael Azoulay #3)
Adam LeBor
For Róbert and Zsuzsa Ligeti, who welcomed me
At Yael’s feet he sank,
—he fell; there he lay.
THE SONG OF DEBORAH
JUDGES 5: 27
PROLOGUE
Northern Syria
He dreams of death.
The pistol’s muzzle, warm and heavy against the back of his neck.
The sweet reek of cordite.
A millisecond of agony.
Oblivion.
*
The blindfold was ripped from his head.
Rifaat al-Bosni sat up slowly, opened his eyes, squinting against the glare of the midday sun.
A boot smashed into his ribs.
He toppled over, bolts of pain shooting down his side, fought to breathe, scrabbled in the dirt, finally righted himself.
The khamsin was a yellow fury. The light blinded. The wind howled. The air was thick with sand, so hot it was barely breathable, slashing at the exposed skin of his face.
His shoulders were on fire, his legs numb, his wrists bleeding from the plastic cuffs that held his hands behind his back. He had not eaten for two days, had drunk only a cup of brackish water that morning. Cold sweat, peppered with grit, sprouted across his face. He closed his eyes for a moment.
The boot pushed hard against his chest.
“Get up, kuffar.”
He knew that voice. Younis spoke with the flat vowels of Manchester, a city in northern England. His face and neck were wrapped in a black and white keffiyeh. Only his eyes were visible, dark and gleaming.
Al-Bosni swallowed, coughed; even the interior of his mouth was coated with sand. “I am not a kuffar. I am a believer. Just not in your God.”
Younis laughed. “This is not a theology class.” He kicked al-Bosni in the thigh. “Get up.”
Al-Bosni struggled to his feet, then his legs collapsed. He sprawled in the dirt, daggers stabbing his thighs and calf muscles as the blood returned. He lay on his side, pulled his knees back and forth. The daggers became pins and needles.
Younis kicked him again. “What the f*ck are you doing? Exercising? You have five seconds.”
Al-Bosni ignored the blow and stood again, carefully. His legs wobbled but stayed upright. The wind was so strong against his back, it helped him stand. He blinked, coughed again, and looked around. A giant black banner inscribed with white Arabic script, There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet, flapped back and forth in the wind. The rayah.
Reached by a single dirt track through the arid scrubland, the settlement was spread over two sides of a narrow inlet of the Euphrates. Huts huddled together a few yards from the river’s edge, but the fishermen and their families were long gone. There was no shop, not even a mosque.
Al-Bosni had been taken prisoner two weeks ago, in Aleppo. The Islamists now controlled hundreds of square miles of territory, from this hamlet with no name to the outskirts of Baghdad. Much of the border between Iraq and Syria no longer existed. A caliphate—an empire of Islam—had been declared, and its brutality was unrivaled. Scenes of torture, executions, and beheadings continuously streamed on social media. Every few days American air strikes pounded the Islamists’ positions, but the leaders kept relocating to small settlements like this one. Al-Bosni had been fighting with what remained of the Free Syrian Army, of moderate Muslims and secular nationalists. Unlike many of his comrades, he was still alive. On either side of the rayah a line of severed heads stared back at him, each mounted on a pole.
A mile or so away, out on a tiny peninsula, a different flag flew: the red banner of Turkey. The Tomb of Suleyman Shah, the father of Suleyman the Magnificent, was a tiny enclave of Turkish territory deep inside what used to be Syria. A road led from the mainland to the peninsula, where the gray stone mausoleum stood in the middle of a verdant, manicured lawn surrounded by a high fence. A small barracks housed a garrison of Turkish soldiers. Amid the swirl of alliances, betrayals, and counterbetrayals, somehow the tomb and its surrounds had survived the war untouched.
Al-Bosni glanced at the water. The Euphrates was swollen by spring floods, a fast-flowing palette of brown and green. A tree branch bobbed in the current, rebounded off the muddy bank, was sucked out into the great expanse of water. What bliss it would be to dive in and be carried away by the current, to float down into Iraq, be spat out into the Persian Gulf.
A blow to his back sent him reeling. He staggered, unable to use his arms to balance. Younis’s hand caught his shoulder, turned al-Bosni to the right.
Younis was famous on the Internet. He used prisoners for target practice. Ideally Shia Muslims, but those of any faith would suffice. Each time Facebook took down Younis’s page, or Twitter shut down his feed, it reappeared a few hours later, the name slightly altered, with even more followers.
Younis pushed al-Bosni toward a mechanical digger that stood near the riverbank, its engine idling. A few yards away black clouds of flies buzzed around a long, deep trench. A jihadist waited by the edge, his face wrapped in a black keffiyeh, a full-sized television camera on his shoulder, filming four fighters as they readied their weapons.
Al-Bosni and Younis stopped near the digger. A long column of blindfolded men, perhaps a hundred in all, waited there, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front. Al-Bosni glanced into the trench. Amid the bodies there were flashes of color: white sports shoes, a green T-shirt, a blue jacket.