[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel
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Dedicated to Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, SEAL warriors to their last breath while serving as contractors in the Benghazi, Libya, debacle. To their very last breaths, they lived up to the SEAL code. The damage they inflicted on the attacking hordes was the essence of courage.
N
AVY
SEAL C
ODE:
1. Loyalty to Country, Team, and Teammate,
2. Serve with Honor and Integrity on and off the Battlefield,
3. Ready to lead, ready to follow, never quit,
4. Take responsibility for your actions and the actions of your teammates,
5. Excel as warriors through discipline and innovation,
6. Train for war, fight to win, defeat our nation’s enemies, and …
7. Earn your Trident every day.
Contents
Part One: Curse of the Infidel
Part Two: Six, Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll
PART ONE
CURSE OF THE INFIDEL
The value of tradition to the social body is immense. The veneration for practices, or for authority, consecrated by long acceptance, has a reserve of strength which cannot be obtained by any novel device.
—
R
EAR
A
DMIRAL
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LFRED
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HAYER
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AHAN, “
T
HE
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ILITARY
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ULE
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F
O
BEDIENCE,”
N
ATIONAL
R
EVIEW
,
M
ARCH 1902
1
(I)
“
You are an infidel and will confess to slandering the name of the most holy and sacred Prophet, sacred be His name!”
As the voice screamed, a stick snapped across my back. The stick, long and thin, was made of plastic. It hadn’t hurt much the first time it touched my skin. But that was over an hour and a hundred flails ago. Now every swat felt like I was being smacked by a baseball bat.
A bat spiked with 20-penny nails.
“You will confess!” shouted my tormentor. “You will fall on your knees before the one true God, blessed be His holy name.”
“Screw yourself,” I said between my gritted teeth.
Thwack.
“Ugh.”
“Confess! Or we will beat salvation into you!”
I was seeing a part of Saudi Arabia that the Tourist Board doesn’t advertise. You can call it the belly of the beast; to my mind, it’s a much lower part of the anatomy.
“Do you confess?”
“No!”
Thwack. Thwack.
Under intense international pressure a few years back, the Saudi government reformed its prison system. The new rules give certain guidelines for “corrective measures”—that is, beating the crap out of a prisoner. The “corrector” must hold a book under his arm while administering lashes. The idea was to keep the torturer from raising the cane too high over his head.
I can attest that the letter of the law was observed in this case. I even know the title of the book, which was an illustrated comic collection entitled
Brave Men in Saudi History.
The book, four pages long (two of them were blank), was duct-taped to his underarm.
Thwack. Thaaaaa-WACK!
Somewhere around whack number sixty-eight, I had begun fantasizing about what I would do to the bastard with the stick. My thoughts were very creative, and in no case would the stick have been recognizable as a stick when I was done.
By now, though, I was beyond any sort of fantasy. I was, as the football play-by-play analysts put it, grinding it out. I just hoped the end of the game wasn’t going to be signaled by a gun.
The Apaches, among other Native American tribes, have an especially useful mechanism for dealing with intense pain. I adopted it now, focusing my concentration on a point just outside my body. As the beatings continued, my mind stepped away and observed the scene.
This got me through another thirty or forty lashes. Finally the pain overwhelmed my body and I blacked out. Oblivion was a welcome reprieve, but it didn’t last long. I came to only a few minutes later, as I was being dragged along a dank and dark cement corridor.
I have no idea why the corridor was dank—the prison I was in was located at the edge of the Saudi desert, which has to be one of the driest places on earth. But dank it was. Moss, crud, and slime water blended into a horrendously smelling mélange between the inlaid stones of the floor. I tried not to breathe.
I’m far from a connoisseur, but I think I can say with some authority that Saudi jails are among the worst in the world. It doesn’t even take that much to get into them. The surest way is by opposing the government or insulting the royal family, but you can get there with much lesser offenses if you know what you’re doing. Drink a beer in your yard or drive a car with a woman who’s not your wife—supposed outrages to Islam—and you will land there in a flash, even if you’re a foreigner. Even random victims of crime who had the audacity to file police reports have found themselves guests of the state.
They were lying, you see. Because the Kingdom is PERFECT, and thus there is no crime, and anyone who says different is a slanderer who deserves to lose his tongue.
Being a traditionalist, I had chosen an oldie but a goldie to ensure my incarceration: I had insulted the Prophet and the Kingdom by proselytizing a vermin religion.
Said religion being Coptic Hinduism, which I had invented solely for the purpose of running afoul of the authorities.
Not that Coptic Hinduism preaches violence or anything remotely touching on the state or other religions. It borrows freely from all pantheons and pathways, seeking peaceful coexistence with all. We’re not much on sacraments, and the heavy burden of conversion is best left to those of other beliefs. In fact, the most definite (and important) thing you can say about it, at least in the context of Saudi Arabia, is that it is not Islam, and therefore fit for repression.
The two guards dragging me to my cell were kindly fellows, and they tried cheering me up along the way by shouting various slogans in Arabic.
“You’re a blessed fellow!”
“You’re going to be very popular in jail!”
“Now you will have a real chance to pray.”
My Arabic is mostly of use in brothels and street fights, so maybe my translation is a little soft. I will say that the others in my cell, all twelve of them, welcomed me with open arms and hard feet as I was hurled into the tiny space.
Walled by solid concrete on three sides, the room was roughly eight by six feet and smelled of sweat and human excrement. I curled myself into a corner at the back, hoping to be left alone.
Unfortunately, one of my fellow inmates had deputized himself as the Welcome Wagon. As he bent over me, a shiv appeared in his hand and he took a swipe at my face.
Coptic Hinduism has very strong precepts against having your face cut up and eyeballs gouged out. It has been heavily influenced by what many readers will recall as the Rogue Warrior’s First Commandment:
Do unto others before they do unto you.
I decided that this was a good time to do some preaching. My opening text was a fist to the nether regions of my new congregant. This was followed by a fist to the throat.
The convict was impressed. He had never before encountered the spiritual depth of Coptic Hinduism.
Still, he was firm in his own primitive convictions, and pressed forward in his attempt to make a blood sacrifice to his gods. While I wanted nothing to do with such primitive religious practices, my retreat was cut off by the thick and immovable wall behind me.
He cut a halo across my forehead. I decided to return the favor by encouraging him to kneel and reflect on the holy light of the universe. Given that he was clearly devout, all he needed was a little push.
Or shove.
I sent him sprawling against the nearby wall. The others were looking on anxiously, perhaps hoping for their chance at conversion as well. So I leapt up, grabbed the little knife that had fallen from my convert’s hand, and baptized him in the name of the Rogue, the Warrior, and the decidedly Unfriendly Ghost.
Duly impressed, the others backed away.
Exhausted by my spiritual experience, I dragged myself to the corner of the cell.
* * *
You may very well be wondering what I was doing in Saudi Arabia in the first place.
The truth was I was here to find another American, Garrett Taylor. Garrett was the son of a friend of mine; he’d gotten into a bit of trouble in the Kingdom Oil Built a few days before. I’d heard that he was currently a guest at this esteemed Saudi institution. I had therefore posed rather ostentatiously as a preacher in hopes of meeting him.
Be careful what you wish for.
* * *
Not long after the blood stopped flowing from the neck of my new convert, a series of loud shouts announced the approach of the guards. We were ordered to clear the cell. I got up, hiding my shiv in the waistband of my pants. My knees were creaking and my spine felt as if it had been removed from my body and rearranged in a random pattern. Being last made me a target for the guards, who proceeded to give me a series of gentle love taps as a reward.