The Last Infidel

A NOVEL

The

Last

Infidel

Spikes Donovan

Dubois & Maloney/San Juan

Copyright © 2016 by
Spike Donovan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Spikes Donovan/Dubois & Maloney

www.spikesdonovan.com

Cover design by SeflPubBook.com/dianecostanzastudio

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Book Layout © 2016 BookDesignTemplates.com

The Last Infidel/ Spikes Donovan
. -- 1st ed.

ISBN 978-0-0000000-0-0

Thanks for purchasing my book!  And be sure to leave a review!  If you like this book, you may also like my other book. Find it at spikesdonovan.com.

Dedicated to the victims of Islamism

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

―
Andre Malraux

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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1
}

Night came to Tennessee.  A full moon, bright and crisp, lit the world, casting a pale light on the land, revealing hundreds of acres of rotting trash.  The gentle hills and slopes of the countryside, once hayfields and pastures of incredible bounty, groaned beneath the wreckage and garbage.  A few farmhouses, surrounded by old barns and garages, rose up from the littered landscape like phantoms.  Farm equipment – tractors, combines, and bailers – sat frozen in place, things of rust, ghosts, old and forgotten.  Two towering silos, covered in Virginia Creeper and poison ivy, pointed skyward like boney fingers reaching from a dying earth.  The old road running from Murfreesboro to Woodbury, once wide and smooth, was now little more than a cratered path.

Jaden Malone stood up and looked at his watch.  Darkness came late at the end of June; and in another ten minutes, Tennessee would be as dark as it would get.  He looked out at the garbage strewn road below: two of his men hiding near an old rusty refrigerator up to their waists in refuse, three others crouching in a rocky gully to his left, the remaining two just settling into a small patch of tall grass to his right.  On the ground beside him was a detonator: a small, green, hand-held device attached to a dark red wire that ran down the slope in front of his position.  Malone had planted his last two claymores.

Malone was the team leader of Alpha Recon 4, a reconnaissance unit assigned to watch the traffic on Hall’s Hill Pike, a nineteen-mile-long winding road that ran between Murfreesboro and Woodbury, Tennessee. 

He knew this area well: he’d lived here for most of his life.  And he knew the people – or he used to – as well as the trails, paths, and creeks from Murfreesboro all the way east to Woodbury and McMinnville.  The Army of Tennessee, headquartered to the south in Chattanooga, had chosen Malone because he knew this area with his eyes shut.

But he didn’t like his orders.  Command had radioed for him to set up in the waste zone two miles east of Middle Tennessee State University opposite the Blaine Farm.  He’d been instructed to prepare an ambush and wait for a covert operative to arrive. 

Malone knew not to ask questions.  He’d been ordered to attack a convoy close to Bashar’s Islamic Front Army’s base (BIFA) operating out of Murfreesboro.  If that’s what command wanted, that’s what he’d give them.  If he was supposed to meet up with a covert operative, he’d make it happen.

BIFA wasn’t a regular Muslim army.  Bashar’s Islamic Front Army, consisting of three thousand fighting men, was the equivalent in size of a brigade in the United States Army prior to its collapse three years earlier.  Its ranks were filled with Islam’s most highly-trained and dedicated fighters, most of them refugees from Syria and Afghanistan via Mexico.  But some were homegrown, ex-American citizens radicalized in the days of their youth; and every single one of them were hand-picked, not only for their allegiance to Islam, but for their bravery and fearless brutality. 

Alpha Recon 4 had been in the field for two weeks, observing enemy movements, counting numbers of troops, and watching field training exercises near the university.  Nothing new.  You watched the roads, waited, and counted the men.  If the columns were large enough, and if they’d been marching all day, you looked for stragglers, men who were tired and resting near the road, or men who had left the road to refill a canteen in one of Tennessee’s filthy streams.  You grabbed one, carried him to base camp, questioned him, and killed him quickly and painlessly. 

Malone perked up when he heard the sound of a barn owl.  Every covert operative – there weren’t many these days – used the call.  They’d sound it three times, wait a second or two, then follow it with another.  The call came from up the hill, just to the rear of Malone’s position.   A man with a camouflage mask over his face hurried down out of the brush a few seconds later.

“What’s the mission?” Malone asked, scanning the road below him.

“Tough one,” the man said.  “Zafar Katila.”  He pulled a picture out of his top shirt pocket and turned on a tiny flashlight.  “This is our guy.  Grab him and get him back to AT as fast as you can.”

“Who is he?”

“Logistics guy,” the man said.  “Not at the top, but high enough.  He knows what Bashar is up to – and he knows other stuff.”

“Bashar’s going to push south,” Malone said.  “We’ve beaten that out of a few tongues we grabbed.”

“Let command worry about that,” the man said, impatient with Malone’s comments.  “Zafar is defecting – he’s the one who set this thing up tonight.”

Malone rolled his eyes.  “You mean he’s defecating on us, right?  We’re being set up.”

“Shut up and listen,” the man said.  “You always talked too much back in college.  What’s with you?  Dang, man.”

“Do I know you?”

“I’m wearing a mask.  So, no – you don’t know me.”

Malone checked his watch.  Nine-thirty.  He shook his head and said, “Hurry it up.”

“Zafar is a Syrian Christian,” the agent said.  “He’s confessed the name of Christ – and he eats bacon.  He says he’s got information.”

“Why couldn’t he just give it to you, and you to me?” Malone asked.

“Zafar Katila wants out of here – that’s part of the deal,” the man said.  “He talks if we can help him walk.”

Malone took the picture of Zafar and looked at it closely.  “They all look the same to me.  This guy’s probably got a stash of gold and needs somewhere to spend it.”

The agent ignored Malone’s last comments.  “Zafar will be here in exactly one hour.  The truck will be coming from Woodbury and it’s going to stop right here in front of you, and Mr. Katila is going to ask the truck driver to---”

“Just one truck?  Good.”

“Probably two,” the man said.  “He’s going to stop, get out, and walk away from the truck to take a piss,” the man said.  “Kill everybody in the trucks, get Zafar Katila, and head south without delay.  Got it?”

The man, dressed in camouflage, asked if Malone understood the mission.  Malone nodded, and the man turned and ran back up the hill, disappearing into the tall weeds and brush like a fox in the night.

Malone scratched his neck.  He rounded up his men and had them remove the claymores they had so carefully placed an hour earlier.  It would be quiet work tonight, he told them.  Quick work and fast. 

Some of the men voiced their concerns about the mission.  Up until now, they’d never had to ambush a convoy.  Besides, they reasoned, Bashar’s army hadn’t the slightest inkling the Army of Tennessee had a recon unit operating this close to their base of operations.  They wanted it keep it that way.  Malone agreed, but he kept it to himself.

Alpha Recon 4 didn’t have long to wait.  Just as Malone settled into his position behind a partially smashed culvert, the sound of a vehicle backfiring broke the silence.  At the top of a hill, less than a tenth of a mile east of their position, faint headlights appeared.  Malone saw a vehicle – then another one topping the hill behind it – moving slowly; and its lights bobbed up and down and left and right as it drove slowly over gullies and potholes.  This was the first time Malone had ever seen Muslims arrive on time.

The team went on alert.  They crouched down into their positions, covered themselves with stinking, rotting trash, and readied their rifles.  Malone smiled.  He and his men had always been able to use the enemy’s own weaknesses against them.  In this case, the enormous amounts of trash Muslims always left lying around seemed like the perfect cover.

Two trucks, both of them Penske moving vans, approached the ambush.  The truck in front looked complete and nearly new, a rare sight these days on both sides of the fight.  The one in the rear, with its cargo box cut down to less than half its size – sharp, uneven, and ragged – served as a troop carrier.  Malone counted fifteen armed men sitting in the rear vehicle.  He used hand signals to pass the information along to his men.

The trucks came to a stop.  The passenger door on the front vehicle opened, and a man dressed in combat fatigues and a baseball cap ran ahead of the truck.  He disappeared behind a clump of cedars twenty yards away. 

Alpha Recon 4, after hearing Malone open fire, sent a sheet of flame and hot metal into the front and rear of the troop transport, raking the vehicle from the front to the back, killing all fifteen men in a matter of seconds.  Most of the dead crumpled forward like lifeless, bloody, rag dolls, landing on the floor of the truck.  A few of the corpses remained upright with their heads slumped forward on their chests.

Zafar Katila, having heard the firefight begin, jumped out from his hiding place and took out the driver in the front truck with a single shot from his forty-four.  His aim was perfect and clean.

In less than ten seconds, Alpha Recon, with its silenced REC7 DI rifles, the last weapons made by a local arms manufacturer before fleeing Middle Tennessee, had cleared the rear vehicle, eliminating Bashar’s men.

Zafar, a short man with dark black hair, holstered his weapon.  He raised his hands, stood on the tips of his toes, and yelled, “Don’t shoot!  Don’t shoot!  It’s me!”

{
2
}

In a small, cramped, greasy office of an abandoned Hardee’s restaurant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Vicki Graham stood in front of her desk gagging on a warm Coke while reviewing typed-up radio dispatches from Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  Graham was the commanding officer of Alpha Recon Command and, as she reread the messages for the hundredth time, trying to make sense of missing or garbled sentences in the transcripts, she became angry.  She was expecting a third, final transcript of a radio communication from a team operating just east of Murfreesboro near the town of Woodbury; and that transcript was two hours late.

Midnight had come and gone, but Alpha Recon Command had not turned off the lights.  For the last two days the entire city block between East Eighth Street and Houston, a restricted area known as the Alpha Recon Hub, remained a hive of nonstop activity lit by torches, lamps, and an occasional generator-powered street light.  Beneath tents and under the open sky, soldiers and mechanics worked feverishly upgrading and repairing weapons. Volunteers from the city inventoried and stacked boxes of dried meats and vegetables.  Seamstresses, peddling old treadle machines, repaired and made clothing.  Volunteers, newly arrived from North Georgia, equipped by the people of Dalton, trickled in a few at time.  When they arrived, they were formed up into units, assigned officers, and marched off to their barracks.  Alpha Recon Command’s highest-ranking officers, working just as hard as the lowliest private, organized and directed all of the activity, giving orders and gratefully taking suggestions.  Hardened volunteer soldiers from the top on down, Alpha Recon was the eyes and ears of the Army of Tennessee.

There was a reason for all of this activity.  Alpha Recon, on orders from higher up, maintained a constant flow of well-equipped men into and out of central and eastern Tennessee for the sole purpose of tracking Islamic State Army (ISA) movements out of the north and east.  Teams went out from Chattanooga on a regular basis, remained in the field for as long as three weeks at a time, and then rotated back in for a week of debriefing, rest, and refitting.  Two days earlier, incoming field reports, spotty at best, suggested ISA movement in the direction of Nashville from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and that ISA was resupplying two units operating out of Knoxville.  Army of Tennessee command interpreted the information as preparations for a possible push southward designed to take Chattanooga and gain control of the Tennessee River.  

Tracy Graham had just sat down and closed her eyes when she heard the sound of someone knocking on the partially closed door of her tiny, cramped office.  When she looked up, a courier saluted, stepped in, and said, “The last transcript from Alpha Team 4.”  He handed her the transcript, saluted again, and left.

She looked at the document, squinting in the soft, yellow light of an oil lamp, and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes.  If she couldn’t focus, she couldn’t read it.  If she couldn’t clear her mind, she’d never be able to make any sense of the transcript.  Not that the transcripts were easy to read even when she was fresh and alert.  The voice encoders in the field radios, which enciphered spoken English into a mind-boggling blend of Lingua Franco Nova and Solresol (LFNS), a musical language based on tonality, five romance languages, and a smattering of Creole, needed work.  The cyphers over at headquarters, still prototype machines, seemed to clog up like toilets at a Colon Blow party, especially when two or more recon teams were transmitting from the field simultaneously.  The results of the cyphers were sometimes sketchy, open to interpretation, and more of a blurred larger picture than precise, pinpoint details.  But LFNS worked most of the time; and it baffled the intelligence officers of ISA all of the time.  The army loved it.

Tracy slipped the transcripts into a beaten and torn manila folder, drank the rest of her Coke, and left her office.  She passed through the old kitchen and into the dining-area-turned-staff-office, trying to tune out the constant click of old, manual type writers, the humming voices of her staff, and the constant slamming of the front glass door.  All of it seemed to come together and form one long, vibrating, brain-wrenching blur.

Tracy Graham was a five-foot-four athletic-looking blonde.  At twenty-seven, she was the youngest commanding officer in the Army of Tennessee. She had accepted her appointment to Alpha Recon two years earlier, following the completion of her rushed and much-abbreviated master’s degree in communications.  Her appointment was based upon the simple fact that, as an employee of an architectural salvage business, Tracy could sell a customer anything and everything, and have him leave the store tickled to death about his purchase.  Such was the experience of Teion Williams, commanding officer in Chattanooga who, as a customer of hers, was impressed that Tracy Graham knew her product, understood and clarified perfectly the needs of her customer, and knew just the right words to use in order to make the sale.  He’d always left the store with a lighter wallet; but he always thought he’d gotten the better deal.  He was also impressed that her education hadn’t hampered her ability to learn on the fly.  And as far as General Williams was concerned, Tracy was the best officer on the base.

Alpha Recon staffers recognized Tracy’s talents and abilities from the moment she arrived.  Her friendliness, which she kept polite and reserved when on duty, made them feel appreciated; her attention to their slightest needs, along with her willingness to get her hands dirty, brought her respect from even the recon teams operating in the field.

With as many as ten recon missions under her belt, Tracy knew and understood the recon war from the field perspective as well as from behind the desk.

Tracy nodded at her personal assistant, Margie Fielding, who had been waiting for her by the front door with a pad of paper and a pencil in her hands.  Two other staffers, sitting nearby, rose when they saw Tracy looking at her watch.  Her meeting with General Teion Williams and his staff, which should have taken place over two hours earlier, was set to begin fifteen minutes following the arrival of the third transcript, which had just been delivered.  The cypher machines, all of them down due to generator failure – probably owing to the fuel shortage – had caused the delay.  Alpha Recon had ten minutes to get to the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences before General Williams sent someone looking for them.

Tracy Graham and her team flew through the streets, reaching the arts and sciences building with only minutes to spare.  With her assistants hurrying behind her, she ran up the flight of stone steps leading to three sets of double doors.  Two armed guards, on the watch for Tracy’s arrival, motioned for her to proceed, and they opened the center set of doors for her. 

Tracy glanced at her watch: two minutes late.  General Williams’ staff conference room was on the second level, and it would take another minute and a half to climb the staircase, run down the hall, and reach the door.

Exactly a minute-and-a-half later, she and her assistants barged into the conference room, out of breath, out of energy, and out of time.  Sixteen of the twenty seats, all of them occupied by the general staff, swiveled around when Tracy opened the door. 

Nobody but General Williams smiled.  He stood up and motioned for Tracy and her team to take their seats. 

The lights never went off at headquarters, though the air conditioning, due to fuel shortages, had been purposely scrapped in the event the brass might be tempted to comfort at the expense of war effort.  A single box fan, precariously perched in an open window, hummed and vibrated loudly.  Some of the women at the table fanned themselves with manila folders.  But everyone looked covered in sweat.

Tracy seldom ever read her transcripts under such bright, white lights before; and she opened her manila folder, conscious everyone around her was watching and waiting.  She removed the last transcript, the one that had just arrived.  It read:

BOOTLEGGER / STRIKE AT DISTILLERY / ALL EMPLOYEES FIRED / MANAGER GOING DOWN TO THE RIVER TO PRAY / HAD PAYROLL BUT NOW GONE INTACT / CHOPPING WOOD /

General Williams cleared his throat and said to her, “Brief us.”

Tracy squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them with her finger tips.  She opened them up and saw not one, but two sets of letters, all of them blurred, one letter overlapping another. 

Margie reached for a glass, filled it with water, and handed it her boss. 

Tracy drained it and took a deep breath, then she said, “Jaden Malone’s team.  He’s lost all his men and he’s wounded.  He says Zafar Katila isn’t with him – where he is he doesn’t say.  Malone is destroying the radio – and that’s a---”

“That makes two teams in as many days,” Langford, the General’s aide, said.

Tracy paused and looked up, smiling tiredly but authentically.  She never interrupted interrupters.  Instead, she listened.

“Go on, Tracy,” General Williams said, with a sidelong glance at Langford.

“Oh – yes,” Tracy said.  “I just need a second here.”

“Take your time,” General Williams said.

  She put the transcript back into the manila folder and slid it over to Margie.  Then she said, “Malone, he . . . he mentions going down to the river to pray.  He’s been shot and doesn’t expect to live.  We’ve never lost a team near Murfreesboro before.  The ambush must have gone bad.”

“As you know, General, Alpha Recon 4 was last operating two miles east of Bashar’s main base in Murfreesboro,” Margie said, looking at Tracy.

General Williams nodded.

Tracy rubbed her face and motioned for her to continue.

“That would have been a little more than twenty-four hours ago,” Margie said. “They completed the ambush, achieved their objective, and---”

“As of this communication, Zafar Katila is safe,” Tracy said.  “More than likely, if I had to make a guess, I’d say Zafar is still alive and there’s no reason to think he’s been compromised.  Malone fulfilled the mission, began extracting his team and the asset, and somebody surprised him.  He made it back to base camp, radioed, and then destroyed the radio.  He’s praying – that means he’s hurt and needs another team to be sent in right away.  I assume Malone died during the transmission.  He didn’t end with his call sign – and he’s required to do so for verification purposes, as you know.”

“Can you verify this radio transcript is from Malone’s team?”  General Williams asked.

“I don’t doubt it’s from Team Four,” Tracy said.  “Come on, Teion – I’m sorry, guys.  I’m just that tired.”

General Williams, confident in her assessment, said, “Who are we sending back in to get Mr. Katila, and how many hours will it take to get a team underway?”  He looked over at his aide, Mr. Langford.

“All of the teams are out,” Margie said.  “We don’t expect a rotation for another---”

“You know people there, Tracy,” General Williams said, leaning back in his chair.  “You know Murfreesboro better than everyone, including me.”

Tracy’s eyes, nearly half-closed with sleep, widened and bulged as she did a double take.  A sudden coldness hit her and, in a soft, shaking, and disbelieving voice, she said, “I’m . . . I’m not going to Murfreesboro.”

“You’re as good at recon as anybody, probably better,” General Williams said, as he slapped his hands down on the table.  “So that settles it – you’re taking a team in.  Langford and I will brief you at 0530, your team at 0540.  Make sure you’re geared up and in my office on time.  This meeting is over.”  He stood up and slid his chair under the table and followed his staff towards the door, purposely trying to avoid Tracy.

Tracy shot up out of her chair and told Margie to wait for her outside.  She hurried towards General Williams, gently pushing several chairs out of her way, and she grabbed his arm.  He turned and looked at her, almost as if to wish her a good night; but she refused to let him leave. 

General Williams glanced around the room uneasily, hoping somebody – anybody – needed to speak with him.  When nobody appeared to have any other business other than to turn in for a good night’s sleep, he resigned himself to the confrontation he knew he’d brought upon himself.

“I can’t do it, Teion,” Tracy said.  “Send me anywhere, and I’ll go.  But not home.”

General Williams sighed, made a half smile, and gently nodded.  He loved Tracy as a daughter, and never in his wildest dreams would he do anything to hurt her.  He waited for the room to clear.  A half minute later, when he and Tracy were alone, he put his hand on her shoulder and said, “I need you on this one, Tracy.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Asked?” Tracy said.  “Funny way of asking!”

General Williams raised his eyebrows and nodded.  “Yes, it was.”

“I’m not doing this – not in a million years,” Tracy said, shaking her head.  “How many different ways do you want me to say no?”

A staffer stepped back into the room and said, “Colonel Graham’s men will be ready to go in the morning, per your orders, General.”

General Williams waved the staffer away.  He turned Tracy around, putting her back to the door, and whispered, “I know this is going to be hard.  But I know you can do this.”

“You don’t know what it’s like not showing up for your own wedding.  And I’m not even sure if Cody is still---”

“He is alive, Tracy – and you can be thankful to God for that,” General Williams said with a smile.  “Seems like he has a guardian angel.  That or he’s playing ball with the towel heads in town.”