Immortals

The Domus Series

Book-I

IMMORTALS

SPARTAN KAAYN

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the people who have been with me and around me during the writing and publication of this book. I would first like to thank a nameless few who detracted me from following this ‘pipe dream’ to become a published author. Your discouragements steeled my resolve to go through with this.

A zillion thanks to my editor, who has patiently gone through numerous drafts of the book and provided inputs that have vastly improved the tone, pace, and the final look and feel of the book.

I would like to thank my wife, who was a constant source of encouragement throughout this exercise and who has readily forgiven the long hours that I have been absent following my dream. My thanks are also due to my son, whose smile helped endure the long hours spent on this book and made it all worth the while.

Thanks are also due to my mother who took me to the books and to the million words, which have kept me company through my reading years and helped me become what I am today.

About the Author

He is a book-addict and loves reading books on popular science, science fiction, history, and fantasy. In his other life, he is a genito-urinary surgeon of repute, specialising in endo-urology and reconstructive urology.

Writing is a hobby and a passion for him and this is his debut novel.

Dedication

To my mother, for helping me find my words.

Back Cover Blurb

Jai, an orphaned teen, is possibly the youngest shooter for hire in the Mumbai underworld. In this netherworld of violence and hopelessness, Jai finds love in the kohl-lined eyes of Juliet, who was sold into slavery to the most dangerous man in town.

They make a mad dash for freedom and in this mayhem, Jai realises something about himself – that he simply won’t die.

Ludvig Hansen, a septuagenarian Norwegian telecom billionaire has one thing in common with Jai – his trait of immortality. However, unlike Jai, Ludvig has used this trait to amass an empire for himself.

Jai and Juliet find themselves on the run from the police and the underground in Mumbai, while far away in Russia, Ludvig’s daughter is kidnapped by the Russian mob. Their turbulent lives collide head-on and they realise there is a direct threat to their lives, immortality notwithstanding. They have to find a way out and they do just that – only this way leads to a new life, in a new world, and in a new time.

Table of Contents

1. Chapter 1: Jai and Juliet
   
2. Chapter 2: Purgatory
   
3. Chapter 3: Was It Another Nightmare?
   
4. Chapter 4: Death on the Sogne
   fjord
   
5. Chapter 5: Two is Company
   
6. Chapter 6: Juliet’s Nursing Classes
   
7. Chapter 7: A Different Time Zone
   
8. Chapter 8: The Home Run
   
9. Chapter 9: The Ambush
   
10. Chapter 10: The Moons
    
11. Chapter 11: The Ambush – Replayed
    
12. Chapter 12: The Bodyguard
    
13. Chapter 13: The Impossible Mission
    
14. Chapter 14: The Revelation
    
15. Chapter 15: The Background Check
    
16. Chapter 16: Tomorrow’s News
    
17. Chapter 17: Sonya Ludvigsdottir
    
18. Chapter 18: Breaking News
    
19. Chapter 19: An Intimate Congress
    
20. Chapter 20: A Radiant Brain
    
21. Chapter 21: The Call from Beyond
    
22. Chapter 22: The Final Preparations
    

Epilogue

Glossary of the Cuss and Other Less Fortunate Words

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one

–Albert Einstein

The Jihadi

Kismayo

Southern Somalia

November 1995

‘One… Two… Three…’

Saiyad al Mahmud Abdi counted the seconds under his breath as he waited for the ninth.

He counted up to eight and then ducked, dropping on his right knee and then turned around, just in time for the 7.62/51 mm NATO round to whizz past his ear, missing the occiput of his skull, where it had hit him in his previous life. Abdi rolled further on to reach for cover behind the mangled and contorted metal of a derelict UN Toyota jeep. He took his position behind the jeep and took aim at the enemy rifle fire. The bullet that had missed him had, by now, given Abdi an estimate of its trajectory. The trajectory translated to the pock-marked, bullet-ridden facade of the erstwhile Radio Mogadishu station.

Abdi had an M40-A3 with him, a prized possession that he had taken from a dead US marine two years ago. He set his left eye to the crosshairs of the M40, and through it he could see the muzzle of the gun that had taken the shot at him.

It was still pointed in his general direction.

The enemy sniper was hiding in a window on the fifth floor of the Radio Mogadishu station. Abdi steadied his aim and waited for his moment. For a fleeting second, he could see the sniper’s head rising against the sill of the window when he had probably just shifted his weight to his other leg.

That was enough for Abdi. He took the shot. The rifle jolted on Abdi’s shoulders and the sound hung above his head. He saw the shell case, through the corner of his eye, drifting in slow motion on to the ground. Abdi’s eyes were still glued to the crosshairs of his M40. The enemy sniper’s gun tumbled down from the window and fell on the ledge jutting out of the floor below.

Abdi smiled, content, as he mentally pictured the brains of the sniper scattered around him in the room in the distant building.

He cursed and mumbled, ‘One infidel less to fight!’

Abdi was committed to fight the holy war, which the infidel
wacals
had brought to his door, his home, and his country. He had fought the war for Allah’s cause and had happily martyred himself the first time for the cause, two years ago.

But Allah had had other plans for him…

The benevolent Almighty had sent him back from his martyrdom. He had been to heaven, had bathed in the heavenly white, and then he had been sent back on the Earth to continue Allah’s fight.

The kind Allah had performed another of his miracles, and Allah be praised that he had bestowed on him the honour of so many martyrdoms in this holy war.

Urban wars could be tedious. Abdi knew that but patience was something he was not in short supply of.

He had been fighting this war for the past five years.

The intemperate rage of his youth had given way to a very balanced head on his capable shoulders. He was widely respected by his fellow fighters as a fearless and feared soldier of Allah. But he had never fought seeking that respect.

He truly believed in the cause.

He had been devout in his upbringing, being the son of a pious Islamic cleric who had preached and practised surrender to Allah’s wishes and His ways in order to attain salvation, to attain the proximity of Allahtallah Himself, to attain the fruits of Jannat, the paradise. He had educated his kids about the corrupt and heathen ways of the white men, and had filled them with a lifelong contempt of the enemies of Allah.

Abdi had risen from being a mere soldier to become now the commander of a sizeable
Jundullah
– an army of the Almighty’s soldiers. Abdi was himself a very wise and learned man and his hours off the battlefield were spent in prayer and meditation. His true self was reflected on the battlefield and he was quiet, unassuming, generally reserved in his demeanour, traits that complemented his dynamism, quick-footedness, wisdom, and patience on the battlefield. He believed that Allah had helped him achieve whatever he had. It had been Allah’s will and Allah’s gift, and he was just the means.

On that particular day, he and his troops had been engaged in a routine patrol of the northern parts of the territory held by the UIC (Union of Islamic Courts) when they had come under sudden sniper attack in the rundown urban landscape of Kismayo. He had already lost five soldiers in the surprise attack and the rest of his troops had splintered from the group and had taken refuge behind the rubble of the erstwhile bustling city, still under the sweep of sniper guns from higher up in the buildings.

Abdi had taken two of the snipers down but it had cost him two of his lives. He had heard of the proverbial cat having nine lives. By the blessings of Allah, he had had many more than that. Abdi had no illusions of immortality, but he had no idea of how many more lives he was going to have. It was for Allah to decide, and therefore he never worried about it much.

Each time he had died in this holy war, he had come back to life awakened from his previous sleep, generally a few hours ago in time, refreshed and undead. The time that he gained varied from minutes to hours depending on when he had slept before the time of his death. All that time was for him to spend again in any way he wished to, to learn from and to undo his previous mistakes. It was like a cassette rewinding and replaying all over again but unlike the cassette repeating the same melody over and over again, Abdi had a say on how the re-lived hours played out the second time.

A lesser, faithless mortal, a
kaffir
, would have gotten crazy to understand why it happened, the thing that happened to him. A lesser mortal would have usurped territory and amassed wealth, using the power of the gift; but not Abdi – he was no
kaffir.
He understood it as one of the many bountiful miracles of Allah and that understanding just pushed him deeper into his faith and deeper into the holy war, which he believed was the purpose of the gift with which he had been bestowed.

He understood that his duty was to thank Allah for considering him fit to receive his bounty, and therefore it was his sacred duty to dedicate all of his many lives in the Almighty’s service and sacrifice.

There was not a moment that he did not think about what was known to him and him alone.

Right then, on the battlefront, he knew that he would have to expose himself from his cover and take yet another bullet to expose and kill possibly the last sniper.

He would have to die another death, then get up from sleep, back again in his camp that morning, and play out the day to reach the point where he had got shot, and then armed with the foreknowledge of the shot’s direction and time, try to not get shot, and in the process get to kill yet another infidel.

He stepped out from his refuge into the open, his legs wide apart and raised his hands to heaven.

‘Allahu Ak…’

The first bullet struck him in his neck before he could finish the holy incantation.

The next one slammed right into his gut.

Abdi made a mental note of the direction of the bullets, and counted the seconds that had passed since he left his cover from behind the jeep until the first bullet that hit him.

There was a faint smile on his lips as he fell to the ground, committing the details to his dying memory, a memory that he was soon going to put to good use.

Chapter One

Jai and Juliet

Mumbai–Pune Expressway, India

8 May, 2012

Jai cried out in anguish as he felt the bullet from the ‘Abdi nightmare’ smash into his guts. Jai had been having these nightmares ever since he had been aware of his dreams. In his dreams, he had always been this Somali
Jihadi warrior. He had failed to understand why he relentlessly dreamt about being a
habshi
Jihadi warrior who fought his wars valiantly and had died in numerous different ways in each of his nightmares. Some days it would be a bomb that ripped him into a hundred tiny shreds and on others it would be a bayonet that sank into the Jihadi’s heart, but on most of the occasions it would be a bullet smashing into him on a faraway battlefront.

He had seen scores of ‘Abdi deaths’ in his dreams and Abdi had come back from each of his deaths, stronger and ready to kill more ‘infidels’. Abdi had thus grown from being a new recruit of ‘Allah’s Army’ to being a feared commander of the Islamic Jihad in Somalia.

These nightmares were always vivid accounts of the war in Somalia and it perplexed Jai, as he had never ever been to high school to see Somalia mentioned in some obscure chapter of a social sciences book and yet all he dreamt about was being a Somali warrior.

He had talked about his dreams with his sister when she was alive and she had understood what they were.

‘They are images of your previous life.’ She had the simple explanation of an eleven year old and that was all there was to it. Jai had only been thirteen then and he had had a very difficult day at the orphanage and a terrible Somali nightmare in the night and then, in spite of his reserved nature, he had talked about his dreams for the first time with Ayesha.

But today, Jai wasn’t on a Somali battlefield and it wasn’t a bullet that had really hit his belly. It had been the point of a boot that had been shoved into his battered guts right about the time when the bullet had shoved into Abdi’s guts in Jai’s semi-awake, semi-conscious nightmare.

That boot-kick had brought Jai back to his full waking senses.

It was almost evening on a totally fucked bad-ass Sunday. Ali and his goons had found Jai in the godown owned by Salim ‘Capital’. There had been a bloody shootout in that godown only a couple of hours ago and Salim and seven of his cronies had been gunned down in the ambush.

Jai, seventeen years of age, was gagged, bound, and beaten up and now he lay curled in a foetal position on the floor of a Chevrolet Tavera that was hurtling down the Mumbai–Pune expressway. Jai knew he was being led to slaughter. The only reason they had not pumped a bullet into his head was that a more gruesome death awaited him.

There were four of them in the Tavera, which was running along the road, out of Mumbai, leaving the skyline, leaving the slums, and then out into the fresh air of the highway. It was dusk and the orange light of the evening sun filtered through the tinted windows to a play of shadows on the seats of the speeding SUV.

He was the prize catch of the melée that had ensued since the day before and he was being led to Rashique
Bhai’s
den as a trophy catch where
Bhai
was going to have his share of ‘fun’ with him before killing him in any one of his grisly ways of meting out justice to those who betrayed the gang.

Jai’s would be an ‘example’ killing; an example to others in the gang, a deterrent against future betrayals.

Traitor Jai was.

Traitor he had been branded.

And as traitor he had been caught.

That seriously limited the number of days to his life and put an immediate and imminent threat to the integrity of his limbs. His seventeen-year-old body was badly bruised; his face lacerated in at least two places that might leave a scar in the unlikely event that he lived through tonight. His handsome teenage face had lost both the front upper incisors and he had a terrible pain in his groin after having been booted mercilessly in his belly and crotch.

He didn’t know about it yet, but there was a slow but steady trickle of blood inside his abdomen from a small avulsive tear in the right lobe of his liver.

Tears mixed with blood from a cut on his left eyelid rolled onto his cheeks, preventing the blood from clotting and drying up on his face.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Ali Asgar hissed as he ploughed the butt of his revolver into Jai’s face. Jatin and Lalit were sitting in the front seats and Jatin was driving the car.

Lalit looked over to the back and sniggered

‘The bugger was acting very smart. Now he’ll know what it costs to cross Rashique
Bhai
.’

Jatin looked back and added,

‘This bastard is only a kid, for fuck’s sake, and look at his guts. He has the guts to think of doing a number on
Bhai
and getting away with it. Even
that bitch Juliet is involved in the act. After all, how did Rajan’s shooters know that
Bhai
would be at her apartment yesterday night?’

Ali whacked Jatin’s head lightly with the revolver butt from behind.

‘
Saale,
keep your eyes on the road. Anything happens to my Tavera, I will have you piss out ten
petis
from your
baburao.
’

Lalit laughed out loud.

‘But this Tavera is not worth ten
petis
, Ali
Bhai.
’

‘Well, my emotional bonding with it has to count for something extra, shouldn’t it?’ Ali chuckled.

Ali liked being called
Bhai
.

The banter died down and the Tavera rolled on the wide expressway towards Pune. The Tavera was on its way to a farmhouse in Shirgaon, on the outskirts of Pune on the Mumbai–Pune expressway where Rashique
Bhai
and gang had taken refuge, after the botched attempt on
Bhai’s
life at Juliet’s apartment in Vashi the day before.