The hot flush that seemed to suffuse Yusuf's entire upper body was fueled by a sense of shame that anyone would compare him with the Prophet. He tried to speak up, but Ozal held up one hand in a peremptory warning. The boy soldier fell silent. His Turkish commander plowed on.
"The emir is not foolish or wasteful with the lives of his followers. He does not ask that they give up their lives needlessly. By surviving the attack on the island and coming safely back to us, Yusuf provides us with information that we would otherwise not have."
Another of the bandit leaders spoke up. Yusuf had to assume these men had some leadership role, given that they were here. This man spoke Arabic, but his complexion was sallow. He looked European, perhaps from the south, where there was much fighting between the faithful and the unbelievers. Yusuf's own Arabic was still very basic, and he was not yet confident in conversation with fluent speakers, although he was able to follow what others said in the language if he concentrated.
"Your emir might dole out the lives of his own men with the parsimony of an old Jew," said the man, "but he spends the lives of our men like a drunken fornicator."
Yusuf expected Ozal to flare in anger at the insulting comparison, but he was wrong. The Turk simply grinned and folded his arms, which emphasized his huge physical stature.
"We are all bleeding, Jukic," he said with an undertone of threat. "Very few of the fedayeen I have sent to fight the Americans have come back. And then only to have their injuries treated before returning to the fray, as Yusuf soon will. Is that not so, boy?"
Realizing he had been drawn into the conversation, Yusuf nodded. It was not a lie. He desperately wanted to get back to the front. He had something to prove to himself, to the emir and Ozal, but most importantly to God. Of course that meant nothing to the bandit leaders sitting in a rough semicircle in front of him. They all regarded him suspiciously.
"So what is it you have brought us here to learn, Ozal?" asked the one called Jukic.
Ozal pulled up a chair and gestured at Yusuf to sit in it.
"My lad here has done something none of us have managed," he said. "He has passed through those parts of the city claimed by the Serbs and the Russians and noted several of the most important depots and barracks as he did so. The emir has decided that in gratitude for your continued support in our fight against the common enemy, we will share this knowledge with you and make no claim on any plunder that may arise from it. The treasure houses of the Slavs, as much our common enemy as the Americans, are yours for the taking." Ozal paused significantly. "When the battle is done."
Yusuf felt his testicles crawl up inside his body as the bandit leaders suddenly turned their attention on him like the edge of a sharpened blade.
"Go on, young one," Ozal said. "Tell our comrades here what you told my men when you made it back to our part of the city."
Yusuf swallowed twice before he was able to speak. The first time his throat clicked dry, a most uncomfortable feeling. The light-skinned bandit named Jukic tossed him a small clear plastic bottle of water that had been sitting by his feet. Yusuf caught it awkwardly but nodded his thanks for the drink. After a few sips, when he thought he could speak without coughing or gagging, he repeated the story he had told Ozal's men when they had intercepted him attempting to cross the park he had seen from his window upstairs.
"I escaped the Americans by jumping into the water when their bombardment was at its fiercest," he explained, resisting the urge to buff up his story so that it shined with a false glimmer of heroism and adventure. "I was frightened. I am sorry…"
Yusuf flicked a nervous look over at Ozal, but the giant merely shrugged and made a circular motion in the air with the end of his cigar. Go on.
"There are no fearless men in battle," Ahmet Ozal said. "Only fools and angels go to war without fear, and there are neither in this room."
Two of the bandit leaders smirked, the one called Jukic and the dark-skinned man with the big hair and the facial scars. The third of the pirates, an African like Yusuf, showed no emotion at all. He simply stared at Yusuf like a bird of prey watching a mouse.
"I drifted for a long time," Yusuf said. As he spoke, he grew a little less nervous. The men seemed interested in his story. He took another sip of water from the bottle Jukic had tossed him.
He could not help staring at the remains of the Disappeared and wondering whether they had been aware of their own deaths. Had God struck them down all at once, or did he take them one after the other so that the last to go knew the terror of what was to happen to them? That had been a favorite tactic of Captain Kono. Instantly he regretted that line of thought. It must surely be blasphemous to compare an animal like Kono with Allah himself. Yusuf's heart began to beat painfully hard in his chest, and sweat broke out on his forehead.
Ozal seemed to note his discomfort. "Go on, boy," he said.
"The streets were all flooded down there," Yusuf said. "It was like the river had come up a long time ago and wasn't going down again. I had no weapon and I did not know where I was, but I knew the emir was somewhere near the big park in the middle."
"How did you walk up the street if it was flooded?" Jukic asked.
"Sometimes I swam," he answered. "Sometimes I grabbed on to whatever was floating by. But there are many cars and other vehicles blocking the roads down there, many of them unseen under the water, and I often hurt my legs on them."
"Did you see any men down there?" the African pirate leader asked. "Any Russians or Serbs?"
Yusuf shook his head emphatically.
"Not down there, no. There is nothing alive down there. It's too difficult and dangerous to move around. I got caught once or twice, my legs trapped and held by something under the water that I couldn't even see. I was lucky it was not raining and the water was not flowing quickly or rising, because I would have drowned. I moved very slowly, sometimes swimming from one building to another, swimming in through the windows, moving from one hiding spot to another so I would not be seen. Sometimes I was able to cover more ground by climbing over piles of trucks and containers that the water had jammed up against one another. There were many shipping containers down there, some of them floating around. I was almost crushed by one as I tried to swim through an intersection."
The men all nodded, none of them interrupting him.
"Go on," Ozal said. "Tell them how you came across your first Slav."
Yusuf exhaled slowly, still shaken by the memory.
"I was floating between a line of buildings, and then my feet were dragging on the ground. Not just touching something solid every now and then but dragging on the road surface."
"You were just floating," Jukic said with open disbelief.
"I was holding on to a big plastic bottle," Yusuf explained. "A really big one. A water bottle, big and empty."
The European seemed satisfied with the explanation.
"I was tired. It felt like I had been swimming for hours. I saw a parking garage where the infidel used to keep their cars stacked on top of each other. The water was lapping only halfway up the office of this garage. I started kicking for it, thinking I might have a rest on the second floor, which was dry.
"It was late in the day, not yet night but maybe an hour or so from getting dark. I was so tired, and I think that's what saved me. I was not splashing or making much noise. I swam in through the big roll-up door and over to a staircase that led upstairs. When I reached the steps, I just pulled myself out of the water and lay there. It was only after a couple of minutes I realized I could hear someone upstairs, snoring. I did not know what to do. I couldn't swim out of the building in case they saw me. Unlike me, they were almost certain to be armed. After a short time I decided to crawl up as quietly as I could. I had done this many times before back home when I fought with Captain Kono. He would often send us into the villages when everyone was asleep. I just did what I have always done, moved as quietly as a snake upon a bird's egg.