“What?” Mustafa looked up, still holding on to the couch for dear life. “Wait. I have other questions . . .”
“I’m sure you do,” David Koresh said. “But don’t worry. God’s got you covered.”
The boy on the tricycle had stopped to listen again. This time the sound—diesel engines, approaching fast—was one that even adult ears could hear.
A Humvee swung into the street. Mounted on its front end was a wedge-shaped steel plow like the cow-catcher on a Gilead locomotive. Two more Humvees with roof-mounted .50-calibers followed behind it. Then a troop truck pulled sideways across the street entrance and Marines with rifles began jumping out.
The boy on the tricycle watched in awe as the Humvees roared past. The gate guard spoke frantically into his radio and then reached for his gun, but a .50-caliber cut him down before he got a shot off. The front door of a house halfway down the street banged open and a man came running onto his porch. A burst from an assault rifle knocked him back through the doorway.
A loudspeaker on the troop truck began blaring a recorded message: “STAY IN YOUR HOMES! . . . STAY IN YOUR HOMES! . . . THIS IS A POLICING ACTION! . . . STAY IN YOUR HOMES!” The Marines fired warning shots at a couple of the other houses.
The lead Humvee crashed through the gate and drove onto the lawn of the Colonial house. The other Humvees pulled in and flanked it, the machine gunners killing two more guards on the balcony above the Colonial’s front door.
As the Marines deployed from the Humvees, other militiamen began shooting at them from the second-floor windows and the dormers on the roof. The militiamen tried to duck in and out of cover, but the Colonial’s wood siding might as well have been cardboard for all the protection it offered, so they generally only got off a shot or two before being killed. Still, there were a lot of them, and the Marines were being careful—because they hoped to take prisoners, they could not simply rake the building with fire from end to end. They picked their targets and lobbed tear gas grenades in between gun volleys.
While his men gave their lives to delay the Marines, the militia leader fled out the back of the house. The attack had caught him in the shower and he came out wrapped in a damp bathrobe, his gray hair tucked under a blue shower cap and water beading his glasses. His bodyguards formed a protective circle around him and they made for a wooden gate in the wall at the rear of the yard.
The Marine snipers hiding in the trees behind the wall let them get most of the way there and then killed all the bodyguards at once. The militia leader stopped short, scowling at the suddenly dead men as if their mortality were proof of incompetence.
The firefight at the house ended moments later. A Marine leaned out of an upstairs window, stripping off a gas mask and calling out, “All clear!” More Marines appeared around the sides of the building.
The wooden gate opened. Umm Husam, Zinat, and Amal stepped through. Amal marched straight up to the militia leader, who still stood glowering amid the circle of corpses.
“Mr. Rumsfeld,” Amal said. “The mothers and daughters of Baghdad would like a word.”
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Jinn
A jinn is a supernatural being. According to Holy Quran and Hadith, God created jinn from smokeless fire, as He created human beings from clay and angels from light. Like humans, jinn possess free will and thus are capable of both sin and submission to God: “There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary: We follow divergent paths.” (Quran chapter 72, verse 11)
Jinn occupy a parallel universe hidden from human eyes—though they can see us, and may choose or be compelled to reveal themselves. Evil jinn may be enslaved by human masters, while good jinn may volunteer their service. The nature and magnitude of their powers is disputed, but they can do nothing contrary to the will of God . . .
JINN IN WESTERN MYTHOLOGY
In Christian Europe and the Americas, jinn are referred to as genies. The Western conception of the creatures comes primarily from adaptations of stories from One Thousand and One Nights, combined with elements of non-Arabic folklore such as the Greek myth of King Midas.
Western tales typically strip jinn of their moral agency, turning them into anthropomorphized wish-granting machines. The wishes invariably go wrong, resulting in tragedy or lasting humiliation for the wish-makers. Although commonly read as parables about the dangers of hubris, literary theorist Edward Said has argued that such genie stories also serve as propaganda reinforcing Western authoritarianism: “This message, that the natural order mustn’t be tampered with, encourages blind deference to one’s leaders—even as those same leaders show no compunction about imposing their own magical thinking on the world.”
The flight home left Andrews Air Force Base in the early evening. After takeoff, Mustafa rested his head against the window and watched America drop away over the horizon.
Amal was in the cargo bay, interviewing the prisoner. By default this should have been Mustafa’s job, but in his extreme annoyance at being apprehended, Donald Rumsfeld had revealed something he might better have kept secret: He spoke Arabic. Not well, and not willingly—but Amal had evinced a knack for goading him into talking and she’d wanted first crack at the interrogation.
The wounded Marine, Salim, was stretched out asleep in the rear of the passenger cabin. His presence on the flight was also Amal’s doing, although Mustafa, who’d been elsewhere when Amal and Umm Husam had spoken to Colonel Yunus, didn’t know the details.
Samir was sleeping too—or pretending to. Upon Mustafa’s return to the Green Zone, Samir had tried to quiz him about his meeting with the CIA director, but Mustafa had put him off, saying he could read about it in the official report. Samir was startled at first by Mustafa’s brusqueness, but then a sad understanding seemed to dawn in him and he nodded, saying, “Yes, perhaps that’s best . . . Perhaps that’s what I deserve.” Since then he’d been withdrawn and uncommunicative, keeping his head bowed during the ride to Andrews, his expression recalling the one he’d worn on the trip into the Red Zone: the look of a condemned man.
When it was too dark to see anything more outside, Mustafa sat up and got out the new reading packet that David Koresh had given him. It contained three artifacts, dispatches from beyond the mirage.
Item number one was a file from the archives of the Jihaz al Mukhabarat al Amma—the General Directorate of Intelligence of the Republic of Iraq—concerning an Iraqi National Police officer named Mustafa al Baghdadi. Mustafa had read it several times already, but now he began again, reviewing the details of his other life: a life recognizable in its broad strokes, yet bound and shaped by a very different set of constraints.
As in this world, he’d been a cop, trying to do good. But “good,” in the Republic of Saddam, was defined more by loyalty and submission to the Baath Party than by any normal measure of virtue. From a promising beginning—top marks in his class at the Baghdad police academy—he’d fallen swiftly. He was reprimanded repeatedly for being soft on suspects, using talk rather than more direct methods to obtain confessions and refusing to pursue cases against people he believed to be innocent. Then, in what should have been the end of his career, he’d attempted to arrest a Party official for the murder of a young girl. Mustafa had himself been arrested and held in Abu Ghraib for several months. Upon his release, he’d gone after the official again, this time turning up evidence not of murder, but of anti-government conspiracy—a much more serious crime. The official had been arrested by the Mukhabarat; Mustafa had received a personal commendation from Uncle Saddam, been restored to his former police rank, and warned to watch his step in the future. But the reprimands and brushes with Party authority continued.