The Mahdi, page 5
Maria explained that it had taken several hours and a few tears to get the story from her grandson. “Michael is being bullied, just like you guessed. Some other boys stay close to the bully and help him out, and they get in a few punches and kicks too. The problem is, no one is allowed to fight back lest the bully’s father get involved.”
She’s on a roll now, Alex thought. It will all come out.
Apparently the bully would direct the other boys to hold whomever he was beating on, then tell the teachers to stay out of the fight. The teachers were afraid of him ever since one called the police and promptly got a beating from the bully’s father. The police, meanwhile, did nothing.
Kevin had gone to pick up his son at school one day, and there was Michael at the bottom of a pile, with the bully sitting on his chest, punching him in the face, and two boys laughing and kicking him. Kevin ran to break it up, only to be punched by the bully as well—and then beaten fairly badly by the bully’s father, who had been watching his son’s antics from a nearby car. The man broke Kevin’s nose and loosened a few teeth too.
When the doctor called the police to the hospital after setting Kevin’s nose, Kevin told them who had assaulted him. The sergeant told Kevin that his best bet was to stay away from the man, who was a big deal in a rough crowd.
“Mobsters of some sort, I suppose,” said Maria.
“And Elena?” Alex said. By now he was pacing across his office, back and forth.
“Elena is her father’s daughter,” Maria said quietly.
The next day, Elena went to pick up Michael. The bully made a rude comment to her, and Michael yelled at him—and when the bully pushed Elena, she kicked him in the testicles, then elbowed him in the face with one arm and then the other. As he was falling, she kicked him in the kidney.
“The bully’s father came running and pushed Elena to the ground,” Maria continued. “When she came to her feet, he slapped her and called her a … a disgusting name. She spat in his face, so he knocked her to the ground with a punch to the jaw and kicked her a couple of times in the ribs. Then he picked up his son and carried him to the car.”
“Not good,” Alex said. “Did anyone find out the name of this ‘rough crowd’?”
“The family is named Cabrillo. The police told Kevin that the father’s a leader in the Bollito gang.”
Alex smoothed his hair with spread fingers. “What do you want me to do, Mother?”
“Fix it,” she replied. “You are a man of legendary violence, and they are people of only ordinary violence. It’s that simple. I don’t ask for much.”
Well, she’s right about that, Alex thought. Mafia, huh?
“Your sister has adjusted to the situation, just as you and your father would expect.” A note of bitterness entered her voice. “She has grown cold and hardened. It’s ugly. I cried and said hello to my new Elena.”
“We’re still nice people, Mom. You married one.”
“I know, and I would do it again. But I didn’t expect it for my only daughter. What are you people? Not just warriors. Wolverines. Something. And now Elena has joined you.”
Alex sighed. “I’ll figure it out, Mom. But you know Kevin thinks I’m a cretin.” He wasn’t worried about Elena—she was a Cuchulain and a Kufdani. But he would have to get some measure of Kevin and Michael. “I’ve seen my nephew maybe three times in thirteen years. I’ll have to spend a few days with them to figure things out, sleeping in their house. Floor is fine.”
“I’ll talk to Elena, see where her head is, and then let you know. I’ll make it happen,” Maria insisted. “But no son of mine sleeps on the floor.”
TANGIER
TUESDAY
TANGIER HARBOR WAS BUSY AT MIDDAY. FISHERMEN SCURRIED ACROSS the waters in boats that looked tiny from halfway up the hill into which the Kufdani Industries’ headquarters was built. Tankers and freighters made their way west to the anchorage and unloading piers at the city’s new dock facilities.
Sitting at his desk many feet above the harbor, drinking mint tea while watching the scene through a window built into a sheer stone wall, Alex thought about what he and Caitlin had discussed the previous day: how to isolate the Orthodox Jews from their broad political support base in Israel. If he could win the goodwill of liberal Israelis while making life miserable for the Orthodox Jews in the occupied West Bank, his end goal would be in sight.
Their primary enemy was the Orthodox Haredi, a separate community of ultra-conservative Jews who had decreed that being Jewish was necessary in order to own property or have constitutional rights in Israel. They had arranged, based on that theory, to have Bedouin land confiscated by the government. A newly elected prime minister had endorsed that theory in exchange for the Haredi votes that had gotten him elected—which in turn had allowed him to avoid prosecution for a smattering of public fraud charges. The prime minister was expected to suck up to the Haredim, and he did.
Hardcore religious fundamentalists, the Haredim encouraged men to avoid traditional work and instead study religious texts at yeshiva seminaries. More than half the Haredi high schoolers attended institutions that did not even teach the Israeli national core curriculum of science, math, and English. Haredi women, on the other hand, were expected to maintain the house and have babies. With a reproductive rate of more than seven to one compared with below two for more liberal, left-leaning Israelis, the Haredim expected to dominate the voting population of Israel before the turn of the next century.
Traditionally, except for one brigade of hotheads called the 97th Netzah Yehuda Battalion, Orthodox Jews did not serve in the military, so Haredim lives were not in direct danger in any conflict. Regardless, the Israel Defense Forces would likely be directed to protect them from harm. After all, they voted in large numbers and as a bloc.
The IDF was competent and well led, so Alex would need to get them out of the way. Shin Bet, which served as the federal police or some such, akin to the FBI, would be a problem too. To neutralize this threat, he would need to change the nature of the conflict between the Israeli forces and the masses of largely unarmed Palestinians in the West Bank.
I’ll have to move first with the liberal Jews, both at home and abroad, he thought. He would need to gain tacit approval, or at least avoid vocal disapproval, from the more modern Jewish community within Israel and the powerful diaspora of liberal Jews in the United States—six million each, broadly defined. I’ll need a way to reach them quickly and effectively.
The trick would be making life uncomfortable for the upper-class Israelis without scaring them. He wanted discomfort without fear.
The Israelis had universal conscription, so soldiers at the fighting level came from upper-class families just like the others. In the likely event that the Israelis responded to his actions by attacking the Bedouin and Palestinian forces that Alex planned to create, he wanted to avoid killing Israeli soldiers and instead wound as many as possible. A thousand Israeli troops with stitches were much better than two or three flag-wrapped caskets shown all over the newspapers.
A good public relations plan was essential. Brooks could probably give him a hint of where to start and who to hire. But if the Israelis decided to punish the Palestinians for supporting his Bedouin position, there could be slaughter. No amount of PR would whitewash that type of mess.
At twenty-five miles long but only six miles wide, the Gaza Strip was narrow enough that any real fight became a very personal knife fight. The Palestinians controlled it, but they were basically leaderless and had no trained military force. They wouldn’t get a chance to fight with slingshots, much less knives, and would lose the fight even if they did.
I need to figure out a weapon that untrained Palestinian troops can use, Alex thought.
He decided the M79 40mm grenade launcher, first used in Vietnam, was an excellent place to start. He had always liked the M79, even fifty years after it was introduced. It acted like a short-barreled, single-shot shotgun that fired a 40mm grenade.
Jerome had procured a bunch of modern, belt-fed South African 40mm weapons for the Kingdom of Morocco, so Alex would be able to count on his knowledge of the current use of area weapons in the hands of line troops, rather than using precision shot rifles. Jerome had thought through 40mm weapons tactics many times over, and the two men had some joint experience in how those tactics played out.
Rheinmetall, the German arms manufacturer, had built an international business in making and supplying 40mm arms and ammunition, including some new anti-drone and anti-armor stuff. Alex had worked with Rheinmetall on fusing its new 40mm fragmentation weapons; governments worldwide now had 40mm munitions for fragmentation, armor piercing, and smoke production. More recently, the manufacturer had announced a magazine-fed 40mm, shoulder-fired launcher with some electronic features that Alex found intriguing.
The Americans had long ago developed a new model to replace the single-shot M79: the Mk19, a belt-fed, shoulder-fired 40mm weapon, with all the hardware required for mounting on a truck, thus supplying a solid base from which to aim and shoot. The newer-design Mk19 performed better, and the Americans had tons of them, but these were now obsolete thanks to an even newer 40mm weapon developed with modern electronics and additional range. That left them eager to dispose of the Mk19s, and make available all the videos and training that Emilie would need to splice together a short, robust training video of how to shoot at dismounted ground troops within one hundred meters. The ammo would have to fit the weapon, but Alex didn’t need all the electronic bells and whistles that could expand the window of lethal usefulness as on the Tangier Bedouins’ more modern 40mm weapons. He wanted to cut, not kill.
The South African weapons had a longer range and employed a plethora of special-purpose ammunition—somewhat fatter than the chamber of the Mk19, often supplied by Rheinmetall. The vast majority of Mk19 ammunition Alex might procure from Rheinmetall would be used against dismounted infantry. By design, only the cutting rounds were small enough to fit into the chamber of the Mk19; the lethality of the larger rounds would be reserved for the better trained troops.
That should be just right for our purposes, he thought.
Alex thought about delivering 40mm projectiles that were fusible, both for range and power, to given targets—thus exploding only under specified conditions. Now that would be a cool capability to have! If the Israelis attacked his Bedouin and Palestinian forces, the one-hundred-meter range of the 40mm could wreak havoc on ground troops. Airplanes and armor would be a more challenging problem to handle, but Alex remembered that Rheinmetall had done some development work on 40mm anti-aircraft weapons, and the Bedouins coming from Morocco would be using the more capable South African weapons, not the Mk19. The Israelis’ armor, or at least the lightly armored personnel carriers targeted by his Bedouins, would be toast. If tanks became a problem, the Swedes had developed some great shoulder-fired antitank weapons. And Jerome said he could get a few of the new American Javelins from the Moroccan army, thanks to Alex’s buddy Admiral Sino ibn Nahir, the minister of defense.
Presiding over the whole communications operation would be Caitlin, hanging out in Tangier with a bird’s-eye view and control of the entire Israeli military communications complex, thanks to Emilie. This extraordinary software had constructed a chart of each communications node in the complex and a click-path to destroy it, neutralize it, or keep it on hold. Caitlin’s little EMP trick, if she could manage it, would have a huge impact on the Iron Dome—Israel’s air defense system, which depended on its electronics to function—if the conflict moved to Israeli soil; their Iron Dome close-in air defense system was also dependent on its electronics to function. The Iran war had introduced electromagnetic pulse weapons to Alex’s mind as big, area weapons riding Tomahawk missiles to knock out electronics in a base or a whole city. He and Caitlin would have to discuss this option further, but shootable EMP had promise.
Zap! Big area. Zap! Small area, he thought. Very cool, if Caitlin could pull it off.
The wreaking of havoc—cutting, not killing—was essential to Alex’s thinking. It would take two Israeli men to carry each injured soldier off the battlefield and a raft of doctors to sew up their wounds. The phones would be going wild. Maybe Caitlin could shut down one of the Israeli support centers; that would delay the news to mothers and other loved ones. Delays in welcoming their wounded kiddies back to civilian life would cause discomfort and stress.
And that would be good for his primary goal: mobilizing disapproval among moderate Israelis. The way Alex was planning it, in the back of everyone’s mind would be the reluctant vision of high-fragmentation weapons driving lethal shrapnel fired from the very same guns—and their kiddies coming home to them in flag-wrapped caskets the next time.
One loose strand did bother him, though: the likelihood of losing control of the Palestinian fighters, who would want to kill Israelis anytime they could. The Palestinian shooters might be appeased by knowing that by shooting 40mm rounds from hiding, they wouldn’t have to get too close to wound as many troops as they pleased. And they would have only the ammunition Kufdani provided to them: the razor rounds, which wouldn’t kill shit and weren’t useful at close range. So it seemed like just a problem of controlling ammunition inventory, rewarding those who attempted to wound only and punishing those who used excessive force. Alex would worry later about how to get field support from the Palestinian leadership—whoever that might be—and how it would play with Hamas, the real power in Palestinian politics, at least in Gaza.
Right now, he worried about his mother.
Alex had heard the sob in his mother’s voice—an almost unheard-of occurrence—and known it was time to pack and get moving. Young Michael was handling things pretty well, Maria had reported, but Alex would just have to deal with Elena’s husband himself. His mother had reassured him that Kevin was a good man. He didn’t think like a Cuchulain, naturally, but he was good for Elena. Or at least he had been, before all this …
The trip involved a stop in Spain first, to the Kufdani Industries distribution headquarters. The education effort operated out of Algeciras, and things would soon be getting more interesting for them too. After that, he meant to take care of the situation with Elena. He wanted to be on the ground in the US before things got even uglier.
ALGECIRAS, SPAIN
WEDNESDAY
A DOUBLE CYCLONE FENCE SURROUNDED THE KUFDANI INDUSTRIES distribution complex in southern Spain. Armed, unpleasant guards manned the gates, and a complicated system of anti-intrusion cameras and devices determined who could and could not gain admittance. Alex, of course, was among the former. He told his driver to take his things to the apartment he kept within the complex, and walked up the stairs to the entrance of a flat-roofed, pastel yellow, two-story building.
Alex and Jerome had upped the company’s security budget by a large amount a few years earlier, when Kufdani had gone into the medical marijuana business with the Berbers. Basically, Alex and Sino—the Moroccan defense minister—had convinced the king to sponsor the legal growing of medical marijuana in the Rif mountain region of Morocco, which was controlled by Berbers, ethnic indigenous Moroccans who had been selling kif on the black market. The case made to the king was that over time, legalizing marijuana cultivation could bring in an extra $20 billion of annual taxable revenue for the Kingdom. With good management, and with Kufdani Industries robustly distributing the product across Europe and the Middle East, that figure turned out to be $40 billion and growing. The company’s educational successes with the Moroccan people had been a bonus, and the king was quite happy about both.
With the Algeciras warehouses filled with as much as ten tons of processed medicinal marijuana awaiting EU clearance, the proper-prior-planning assumption had been that someone, sometime, would try to break in and steal as much as they could. Jerome had initially complained to the locals about vandalism, then said he would handle security himself.
After a few days, a nice lunch or two with the local authorities, a convincing smile, and a bright blue Vespa delivered to one particular door, the authorities had given Kufdani Industries whatever permits were requested. Vague promises of ongoing political support and few questions about zoning sweetened the deal. Kufdani Industries had gone about expanding and lengthening the Algeciras airstrip to seven thousand feet, initiated a bonded cargo air service, and procured a small fleet of used C-130 airplanes from the United States.
The pastel yellow building was well tended and boring except for the flower beds surrounding it. Alex had long since told Achmed, his CEO at Kufdani, that he favored hiring women in the growth of the business and intended to foster that environment. So most of the building’s occupants were women who took pride in the flowers. More than a few were women who liked to shoot.
Alex and Achmed had been childhood friends. When he was twelve, Achmed was ceremoniously “given” to the Kufdani grandfather, who had then “given” him to young Alex. It was an honor to be so named, for both Alex and Achmed—akin to the concept of the godchild in the Christian faith. Indeed, these two had an abiding faith in each other, and their friendship had flourished for several decades. Achmed was ambitious, but content with the traditional relationship. Alex, whose upbringing was more Western-facing, was less so.
“Why favor women?” Achmed had asked long ago.
“Because they cost no more than men and adapt to business at least as well” came the response. “If treated well, they may even have a better work ethic. There is also less competition to employ them, so we can spend time molding them to the Kufdani way of doing business.” Alex then wanted to confirm this approach was acceptable to the CEO.
“Hey, you put me through the MBA program at IMD in Lausanne. I like Switzerland. You own me, literally.”
Achmed had flourished at Kufdani Industries, and he now ran an organization of more than thirty thousand people across their trading market. Of the top thirty executives, thirteen were women. The most senior was Hala, who ran both the education effort and the European marijuana distribution business but always mentioned the education effort first, even though it was vastly smaller than the distribution business. To most people, Hala appeared to be the proverbial mystery wrapped in an enigma. Despite knowing her for years, sometimes intimately—with Caitlin’s approval—Alex didn’t really know her either.
