GUNSLINGER GIRL

"Pied-Rouge"

By

Robert Frazer

Based on characters created by "Wraith11"

When I think of others' misfortunes, I forget mine.

Algerian Proverb

"Hey, waiter! Just what do you call this?"

Basem blinked, uncomprehending, the suddenness of the interjection catching him flat-footed.

"I asked you a question! Or are you deaf as well as slovenly?"

They weren't alien words, but they were coming out of an alien mouth – the white European had snapped at him in perfect Arabic. It was like a slap whipping against Besem's cheek – before he could feel the stinging hurt it had taken a moment to process that it had even happened.

"What? I have no idea—" Basem narrowed his eyes and began guardedly, in Berber.

"And don't pretend not to understand me! That's compounding the insult, and this is bad enough already." The European took his coffee cup up and banged it down on its dish, slopping the contents over the table.

Basem's eyes flicked open again, almost boggling in shock. The European had spoken in Berber as well.

His wide-open sight took in not just the European's angry glower fixing him, but the rest of the café surrounding him. There were a number of other customers – all white Europeans as well, tourists – and the noisy crash of crockery had caused them to look up from their own drinks and meals and turn towards the commotion... with emptily idle looks that could just as easily be stirred to horror or outrage once something was given to occupy their attention. Basem swore mentally and hurriedly composed himself.

"I'm terribly sorry, sir, I am a mere uncultured man and have not yet trained out my uncouth peasant tongue." Basem smoothly switched back to Arabic – he could guess what the angry man was so het up about but he wouldn't give him the satisfaction of crowing it to the other customers. "Is there a problem with your order?"

The European gazed at Basem coldly for a piercing moment, before tapping the rim of his coffee cup. "I will have a fresh cup. One that's not contaminated by your... effects." He replied, also in Arabic.

Inwardly Basem seethed at the impudence of the pallid sack of birdshit, but it boiled behind a veneer that shone with the glossy gleam of an endearing and convivial host. "Sir, I assure you that only the finest ingredients and most careful preparations go to my food and drink..."

"Liar! Do not the words of the Prophet say that 'Thou shalt not raise a false report; put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness?' Just as well that a deceitful swine like you runs a filthy hovel like this!"

Basem's vision swam; his breath was choked in his throat; his heart thudded hammer-blows that almost knocked him over. He lurched forward, thinking to fall on and smash down the vile European and turn his soft white face raw and crimson for twisting Muhammad's holiness with his infidel spew, but instead found himself clearing away the coffee cup, wiping the spillage down with a cloth from his apron, and assuring his valued and respected customer that if everything was not to his satisfaction then he would be more than happy to provide him with another cup free of charge.

As soon as Basem turned away towards the café bar his eyes flared with incandescent rage. He had a good career. Rich Europeans who wanted a taste of 'culture' but whose delicate, effete, simpering constitutions could not bear the thriving bustle of a real city would come to his café on the very edge of the casbah for 'authentic Algerian cuisine'. Basem was always the welcoming and accommodating host to every new arrival, because he took great pleasure in overcharging them for effluent that he would not feed to a dog, redressing the European glut of unearned, idle wealth. In deference to the Prophet's exhortation to fairness and probity, though, Basem left a little extra in every plate to make up for the increased price – a gob of his spit, or the dirt on his left thumb. All the while he laughed at the contemptible, bleating stupidity of whites – only now one of them had seen through it all and spoiled the joke.

Basem debated whether to spit again in the new cup as he poured it out, but decided against it – as much as he hated conceding an inch of ground to the European he might choose to make an issue of it in French the next time, and he'd be left with a ruined business as well as ruined pride. He could already hear the fluttering snatches of breath as other customers whispered amongst each other – they might have not been able to understand Arabic but it would have been obvious just by looking what the argument was about. As he glanced around he could see that a few were looking at their plates critically, and one was leafing through a tourist's phrasebook intently, trying to understand what he'd just heard. Another stupid white – but this time, Basem took no pleasure in the fact. Whisperings – the tiny little cracks that could collapse the greatest edifice, the selfish, petty, cruel conspiring of apostates and traitors which saw his forebears being dragged out of their beds to be shot by white police and their bastard half-breed pied-noir offspring during the great battle of the city. Fifty years ago and before his time, but as fresh as yesterday and as vivid as if he'd been there, cutting a new scar every time a white European smiled at him and wished him good-day as they left a tip.

Hatred curdled in the pit of Basem's stomach as he took the coffee over to the precious self-absorbed linguistic show-off, and placed it down in front of him carefully. "I hope that this is more to your satisfaction, sir." His one consolation was that the European seemed to have been motivated by another pointless, imbecilic white conceit - fairplay. If the European had shouted out in his own language he could have humiliated Basem openly before everyone, but strangely he had decided to speak in Arabic and limit his advantage. His loss – maybe the pompous white was more stupid than he imagined himself to be.

The European lifted the cup up from its dish, studied its rich chocolate-coloured surface, took a sip, played it over his tongue, swallowed with a noisy gulp, and nodded appreciatively.

"Excellent." He said in French, nodding his appreciative answer to the rest of the café. "That's great, thank you very much."

Basem choked back an anguished howl at the European's cutting magnanimity and stalked back towards the bar.

Jethro watched the waiter go. He could see muscles clenching and unclenching beneath the man's thin sleeves and shirt, as though a serpent was coiling underneath his skin - it was something of a dark marvel to see someone so afflicted with rage, the beast of malice knotting and choking his very organs. Briefly Jethro wondered if he should have been avoiding such stunning sights – the operation was about to commence and a performance could well have attracted undue attention to himself – but after four months of living out of the back of a car he didn't think that it was too unreasonable to expect to have a proper cup of coffee. He had already been very reasonable about accepting its poor quality even before taking the waiter's poor hygiene into account.

It was also something allowed him to practise his bluffing. Jethro couldn't speak Berber; entirely apart from the fact that the tongue of desert nomads didn't exactly have a Linguaphone CD in the bookshop, after English, French, Arabic, Russian, a smattering of Central Asian dialects – and Italian, now – there simply wasn't much space left in his head to fit in another language. However, he'd rehearsed a few set phrases, and it seemed that he was able to deploy them successfully – even though the speech hadn't been friendly, it was unfortunate that demonstrating some closer knowledge of Algeria didn't seem to provide any consolation to the aggrieved waiter.

The waiter in question was still behind the café bar, apparently washing some pots (at least Jethro had been able to inspire some good practise) but scouring them with a black look of sick fury rather than rubbing them with soap and water. As Jethro studied the bitter man he cast his mind back to one of his earliest interrogations, which had been not long after he had caught the eye of the SIS. It had been a Russian, a real Red who recited passages of Lenin and Marx as a priest would litanies of faith. But his religion had proven false – no miracles had enjoined the people in the splintered land of Afghanistan, no manna of the means of production had filled the bellies of people whose stomachs were rotted by vodka, and his idols had crumbled with the Berlin Wall. He had claimed that the only things that had sustained him in his desolation were his anger and outrage and desire for vengeance, the only things giving his life purpose and direction out of the wastelands. Across the table, Jethro had seen it differently. The man's hatred wasn't a symbiosis revitalising him with an influx of fresh energy – it was a parasite, an infestation draining him of his last dregs of self and vestiges of worth, and would leave him an empty husk before it had had its fill; any satisfaction that he had felt was just a numbing poison to dull the bite of its fangs. That wasn't just fine words and cant – the Russian had emerged from Afghanistan with medals and a pension, then lost a hand in Angola, then an eye in the Congo, then tried making bombs for the Continuity IRA and spent his last hours as a dribbling sack of flesh slumped in a Libyan SIS safehouse, before being dumped on the road for a hit-and-run accident to be arranged.

In his time in Algiers preparing the ground for Monty's run, Jethro had seen very much the same thing writ large, sunk into the city's very foundations. The other diners in the café, having already lost interest in the past diverting episode and returned back to their own conversations, were murmuring about how wonderfully exotic the Casbah looked; Jethro's own eye settled on a line of bullet holes drilled above a doorway – chipped and ragged, as though they had been shot through decades ago and since been incorporated into the very fabric of the building, eroding along with it. More than forty years had passed since the violent, bloody seizure through which Algeria had been wrenched from France; two generations had been raised singing new songs and saluting new flags, not even having known what had come before them, and their fathers who had had still had a long time to enjoy their victory. Despite that, though, Algiers' streets were fronts, and its districts control zones; its people were enjoined in a close community, but that was because their connections came from eyeing each other warily and their bonds were restricting ones of the threat of mutual violence. Algiers was a city not at peace but at ceasefire – every inhabitant was fighting a war, and only waiting to receive the order to advance to bloody contact.

In Algeria, the colonial power had not only withdrawn but been beaten, but while the citizens of the land could have distinguished their new state by gilding her with the splendour of the victory, they instead chose to brand her with the anguish of the struggle. It was a ugly, pugnacious attitude that a new nation born out of conflict could only be sustained by it – a consuming mutation cankering the soul.

Jethro's musing had lasted him until the end of his coffee cup. Taking a last drag from its dregs, he checked the time, left his payment, and made to leave. The cracks in the pavements of Algiers – and the holes in its walls – were where the parasites made their nests.

Now, they were going to fill one in, at least.

Khalil was ill at ease. For years now he had lived in tents, under borrowed roofs and in the lee of tumbledown walls – and, when the situation called for it, beneath floorboards and down ditches, too. The left hand should not know the right, and so had Khalil lived a half-life, moved through a twilight world, and known no-one save as a voice, speaking for another voice, through the grainy ghost of a radio. He never saw another being – they were pinched shut by the bead of his rifle's iron sight.

Yet here he was, both he and his bodyguard Bilal shifting and scratching uncomfortably in ill-tailored Western-style business suits, as much out of place as a room which combined a line of Arabic window-arches with a row of French shutters, and Bedouin wall-hangings and reed floors with black leather couches, electric light and a Japanese television at one end of the room.

He glanced around him, taking in the other six occupants of the room. All were clothed similarly to him, although they looked much relaxed and settled in their outfits – even the three leaders' own individual bodyguards lounged comfortably on the couches. Khalil twisted his mouth into a small frown and plucked at his sleeve irritably – it all seemed vaguely unseemly, as though indolent Western idleness could seep through their very style of dress.

"Sirs," he began, voicing the essential doubt that itched at him, "I beg your pardon but I do not see what part I have to play in your discussions – I am a transporter and fighter, not a financier or strategist..."

One of the senior figures, standing by the closed window-shutters and carrying a glass filled with something that Khalil couldn't tell was alcoholic or not, smiled indulgently and raised a finger as though a point had been made. "Ah, you see, that's exactly the reason why you're here."

Another senior leaned forward in his seat, a stern look creasing his features. "Perhaps you can enlighten us then, Hakim," he began, his strongly affected Benghazi dialect immediately identifying him as a Libyan (and the rigid shoulders that followed the cut of his suit disturbingly precisely betrayed him as a military man), "the sooner this is done, the sooner we can be away before a CIA missile blows us all to Jannah."

Hakim leaned back against the archway and made a show of a theatrical yawn. "Maybe we should wait, then," he drawled languorously, "as I wouldn't mind my ticket to Paradise being pre-booked."

Khalil heard Bilal make a sharp intake of breath beside him, and he was inclined to agree, his own gaze hardening. Seniority could confer some liberty, but now Hakim was now being rather too casual.

The pair were not alone in their sentiment – the Libyan's expression was nothing short of thunderous, and he was gathering a breath to shout before Hakim smoothly snatched the opportunity out of his mouth. "Calm yourself, Farag! The Prophet – peace be upon him – did have a sense of humour, too. Here," he changed tack, pulling a remote control out of a pocket with his free hand, and levelling it at the television, "here's something that you'll all like."

The screen flicked on with a brief static whine, and murmurs of interest rippled across the room. The television was cycling through photographs of the Italian city of Venice – that wondrous foundation of European artistry and magnificence, and one which, like Europe itself, was steadily sinking into ignoble oblivion as the waves lapped up and over it. The "City of Light" was descending into dusk as new powers of the Faithful were lifted up by the inexorable wheels of time and fortune...

...with a little greasing of the gears by terrorism.

The pictures changed to images of the Piazza San Marco. Saint Mark's Campanile shot up from the square, a heroic spire that proclaimed the city's identity in the same breath as its veneration of God – but now, it looked more like some rotted fang in a decrepit animal's mouth. A massive cavity was gouged out of its side, with smashed brick forming a ragged, mutilated edge to the grievous wound that had been dealt to the historic structure. The Piazza's pigeons pecked for gizzard-grit amongst the detritus scattered around the wrecked tower's base – much like vermin worrying a corpse.

Everyone present made appreciative noises.

"Are any of you familiar with the Padanian insurgency in Italy?" Hakim asked.

Khalil nodded. He didn't exactly have access to CNN and his main occupation was dispatching jihadi to Iraq and killing American sympathisers in Niger and Mali, but even so news of the dramatic and explosive battle in Venice had reached even his ears.

Hakim walked over to and tapped the television screen. "When Western soldiers still trod on our soil, Italy – limp, effete Italy – was seen as the 'soft underbelly' through which they could reach up to strike Germany. It will be the same for us, except our ambition is greater and the spoils are richer – all of Europe.

"Tell me, what is the chief obstacle to dar al-Islam?" Hakim put down his drink, and suddenly his earlier levity had vanished – it was as though a mask had dropped down over his face. "We are the Elect of God – so what prevents us from hanging every last American and British pig from the lamppost and minarets in Baghdad? Wiping out every last treasonable black in Darfur? Hounding every last stinking Jew into the sea, and reclaiming Jerusalem for Arabs?"

"NATO bombs and satellite imaging." The Libyan, Farag, muttered sourly.

"Sheikhs who would rather drill oil than fight infidels." The fourth senior piped up.

Hakim nodded towards the fourth man. "Bassam there is closer to mark." Hakim closed his eyes and released a long, stuttering sigh, as though he was expelling ill humour from his body. "Disunity.

"Disunity is why Allah's providence has not deemed us worthy of victory. Since the first days when the Shia in their jealousy had to cleave to their wretched, snivelling Imams, it has hobbled us. Islam is submission – the final word of Allah, the ultimate teaching, the revelation of the world as it should be. The Prophet – peace be upon him – showed us the way by which Man and God could be reconciled; to deviate from it then is illogical, irrational. Madness.

"And yet, over a millennium later, we still have not run the Pope from his palace, and we are still not reciting sutras in cathedrals, and we have still have not rendered the Jew down into the slavery that his miserable subhuman kind is only worthy of – because we, all of us at every compass point from Mecca, still fail to embody Allah's will in totality, and so we do not have his bounty.

"Israel could have been smashed and burned decades ago, but Hussein of Jordan valued his tinpot throne more, and repressed the Palestinians in his country. The blinkered Shi'ites of Iran blindly assailed Iraq, weakening Saddam for when he was challenged by the West—"

Khalil coughed pointedly. He was looking at the coppery fluid in the glass that Hakim had left by the side of the television, which he was now pretty sure contained whiskey. Will of Allah, indeed. So much cant from a hypocrite with a varnished tongue. Fine, true words, certainly, but Hakim was unworthy to speak them. "Hakim, I have absolutely no interest in whipping myself with past shame of forgotten defeats. Leave that to Christian flagellants and Western liberal guilt-junkies – I prefer to inflict suffering on my enemies rather than myself. Is there a point to this pontification?"

A shadow passed over Hakim's face, visibly irritated at Khalil's interjection, which had interrupted him in full grand flow. It passed quickly, though, and a sunny disposition beamed after it. "Of course, Khalil. The purpose is to establish that disunity is a severe matter. Yet the Padanians in Italy provide us with an opportunity to make good on this" – he turned back to the television – "for just as disunity has inhibited us, so shall it undermine them.

"The Venetian battle here was achieved thanks to the enterprise of our Libyan comrades." He nodded in acknowledgement to Farag. "In supplying arms to the Padanians – and nothing so trite as AK-47s, but powerful missiles and miniguns – they have already struck a great blow, a shot heard round the world. The potential remains, though, to do even more, and to evolve this into a pan-Arab campaign of proxy insurrection. With Farag's governmental and industrial connections, Bassam's contacts with our brothers across the sea, Khalil's knowledge of trafficking and, aha, my money, we can strengthen the Padanians from a mob of provincial sectarians into a formidable guerrilla army... a self-destructive force which will break open Europe without the spilling of a drop of Arab blood. Maybe even the foundation campaign of the Great Maghreb Sultanate, forged in the pride of defeating the unassailable West...?"

Hakim let the question hang in the air, the thought a juicy bait to tempt the appetites of the others in the room.

Farag nosed it, but turned away, failing to be hooked. "Before we embark on any grand adventures," he began, his voice laden with sarcasm, "you still haven't given me reliable assurance that this location is safe. Before I divulge or discuss any information I need a guarantee of complete confidentiality..."

Hakim laughed lightly. "You really are a sourpuss today aren't you, Farag? As I said earlier..."

As Hakim and the Libyan bickered – a very promising start to restoring pan-Arab unity, that – Khalil's attention wandered back over the television. It was still mutely cycling through an automated slideshow of images of the fight in Venice, but what was more interesting was that it had moved from generic news-footage of the ruined Campanile to grainy but visible images of the battle itself, presumably taken by hidden cameras that had been secreted amongst the buildings fronting the Piazza, or maybe by an enterprising paparazzo who had squeezed through the police cordon – if only it had been a brother!

Whatever the source, though, they were indeed a vivid and potent exhibition of just what Libyan support had enabled the Padanians to accomplish. During his own jihad Khalil had seen numerous firefights, but they had been ragged, scrappy skirmishes with clunky, ageing weapons, and more often than not he had to corral 'warriors' whose only talent was boasting and who judged vigour by the din of flailing full-auto spray. It was strangely baffling to see a gunfight conducted where every movement was gauged and every shot was aimed, where the combatants fought with might (and not machismo) in a geometric battle of military precision... and destruction, as the Padanians deployed hardware that rent blazing gashes of fire through lines of black-suited soldiers...

...and young girls?

Khalil blinked, not believing his eyes, and peered closely at the screen, before his eyes widened again to take in everything about the remarkable sight. As ludicrous as it seemed, they stood there, plain as day – burly, hulking operatives being led by a slight adolescent with a skirt and flowing auburn tresses; a shock of twisting gold streaked up the side of the campanile with the speed of angel ascending to heaven; and when the warhead crashed through the Campanile belfry, a girl was caught by the breaking masonry and tumbled along with it...

...she had a strange pose. It was obviously impossible, but it still looked for all the world as though she'd been carrying the missile.

Khalil glanced around the room worriedly, seeing if anyone else had registered just what had passed before the screen. Was he the 'junior member' of this partnership? Did they know something that he did not? Khalil had no high opinion of Europeans, but even so he couldn't deny that child soldiers belonged more in West Africa than West Europe. Khalil turned towards Bilal, and could see similar consternation deepening his expression too.

Something... unnatural was suggested by those pictures. As a guerrilla and a terrorist, Khalil prided himself on being part of a secret war, of being favoured with knowledge and insight of conspiracy and intrigue beyond the scope of common folk, seeing the mechanisms of machination that really operated the world behind the facades of normality. Here, though, Khalil had the creeping, disquieting sensation that somehow the joke was now on him.

"—don't forget that we're in the Casbah," Hakim droned on, "and it is not a city district, but an integral fortress writ large. The narrow alleys will stymie any advance on us at ground level, and the rooftops of this and all of the surrounding buildings are covered by my fighters. It matters not whether the threat comes from above or below – we're invincible."

(Continued)