Читать книгу Sorry Time - Anthony Maguire - Страница 8

ALI TOOK A WEAVING PATH through the scrub, keeping to the stretches of bare earth. Every now and then he’d reach down and touch the hilt of the hunting knife at his belt. The feel of it was reassuring, calming. He was glad his brother hadn’t tried to make him relinquish it along with his rifle.

He’d ordered the knife on the web and taken delivery of it a few days before they left for their shooting trip. It was called a Jungle Master and had a 10 inch blade. One side was honed to a razor-like sharpness. On the opposite edge, the blade was serrated, a vicious saw with wickedly sharp teeth. So far, four days into their trip, Ali had used his Jungle Master to decapitate three kangaroos, a dingo, a feral goat and a massive camel.

Ali’s meth-tightened facial muscles creased into a smile as he recalled the death and beheading of the camel two days earlier. The beast, descended from the dromedaries driven across the outback by Afghan cameleers back in the 1800s, had represented the ultimate challenge to his surgical skills.

Abdul had managed to steer the ute close to the camel, which stood less than 30 metres away, its head down grazing on the leaves of a small bush. Before the vehicle came to a halt, an excited Ali had the door open and leapt out clutching his rifle. He put the weapon to his shoulder and pumped six bullets into the massive brown body, none of which brought it down, before a calmer Abdul stepped from the ute and aimed his rifle just behind the animal’s shoulder blade. He fired a single round which penetrated the camel’s heart and brought it crashing down to the desert floor like a felled tree.

Even as the camel’s legs kicked in its final spasms, Ali had run to it and drawn the Jungle Master. Like a surgeon exploring the area to be operated on, he reached down and felt the camel’s twitching neck around its top vertebrae. Then he lifted the watermelon-sized head by one of its ears and slashed into the throat, cutting through the windpipe and surrounding tissue. Ali then made a deep cut on either side of the neck and copious amounts of blood gushed out as the carotid arteries were severed. Next he sawed between the vertebrae at the back. Finally he put the bloody Jungle Master down and took the camel’s head in both hands. With a quick jerking motion, he twisted the head anticlockwise almost 180 degrees. There was a tearing sound as the head parted from the animal’s long neck and loose skin broke away. Then Ali triumphantly held his trophy aloft like a racing driver who’d just won the Grand Prix. The entire process had taken a bit over 30 seconds.

He longed for the time, not long from now, when he’d be able to practice his skills on humans. His desire to kill and maim other human beings was his real driving force in wanting to go to the front line in Syria. He wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in the politics or the religion.

While some people might have an ambition to jump out of a plane wearing a parachute harness, or to climb a Himalayan peak without oxygen, Ali saw the pinnacle of his own future achievement as beheading kufr with his Jungle Master. Maybe he could even take over from the infamous executioner known as ‘Jihadi John.’

Jihadi John was actually an ex-Londoner called Mohammad something – Ali couldn’t remember the surname. Wearing a black hood, he’d wielded a knife very similar to Ali’s Jungle Master in a string of Islamic State beheading videos. But lately, Jihadi John had dropped out of sight and there had been reports he’d been killed in a drone attack. Maybe there was now an opening in the Islamic State job market and Ali could become the new Head of Beheading.

As Ali made his way through the scrub, weaving between black, claw-like mulga branches, he fantasised about being the star of the latest Islamic State beheading clip. He saw himself out in the Syrian desert, framed by the camera lens, standing over the kneeling form of a blindfolded man in an orange jumpsuit. Behind them would be a line of hooded, black-uniformed warriors holding AK-47s. Ali’s face would also be masked and he’d be wearing the same kind of full-length black robe favoured by Jihadi John.

The condemned man might be a Syrian soldier, an American journalist, a downed Russian pilot, maybe even an academic expert in the ancient temples, statues and other symbols of idolatry which dotted the desert. The camera would zoom in on Ali’s face, just two eyes in a black hood. His eyes would burn into the lens as he said: ‘We are unstoppable! Whoever stands in the ranks of kufr will be a target for our swords. Allahu Akbah!’

‘Allahu Akbah!’ the faceless men behind him would echo. Then the camera would show Ali lifting his Jungle Master from its sheaf. ‘Death to the infidel!’ he’d shout before grabbing his victim’s hair and …

Ali was suddenly jolted back to reality. A snake! That was what it looked like, lit up in the torch beam. Long and black, lying unmoving on its belly in the dirt, but ready to spring into attack mode and sink its fangs into his leg. Ali’s heart, already pumping hard from the effects of the ice, performed a drum roll and his knees started quivering. He wasn’t scared of many things, but snakes were a definite exception to that rule.

But then, as he held the beam still, he saw that the snake was really a rippling, serpentine length of fallen wood. He gave a nervous laugh and licked his lips. Despite now knowing it was inanimate and harmless, he gave the branch a wide berth as he resumed his trudge.

A small grasshopper settled on Ali’s sweat-beaded face and he swatted it away. With the moon so high in the sky, there was now a lot of natural light and he would be able to pick his way through the scrub without the flashlight, and the bugs it was starting to attract. But like the Jungle Master at his hip, the torch beam was reassuring, so he kept it on. The lights of the houses were closer now, perhaps another half hour’s walk. On the horizon, lightning flickered. Several seconds later, there was a faraway rumble of thunder. Ali quickened his pace.