Page 4 of Soul on Fire
And then, Idrissa found God.
It happened during a weapons shipment to the Maghreb up to the fighters in Mali and Libya, a shipment he’d decided to personally oversee. Why, he couldn’t say. But something pushed him to get on the plane and fly with the cargo under the radar stations, only dozens of feet above the sand dunes of the Sahara. The desert spread over the continent like an ocean, waves cresting and frozen in time, bathed in moonlight.
When he landed, his eyes were opened to the truth. There was true evil in the world. There was evil and it dealt death on a scale Idrissa could only see in his nightmares. Evil was merciless. Evil hated Africa and the Middle East and everyone that was not them.
Evil had a name. And Idrissa had a purpose.
No longer did his money go to women and drugs, to hookers and cocaine and Lamborghinis. He sent hundreds of thousands to al-Qaeda, and then more to Libya. Palestine. Chechnya. Anywhere that fought against the Great Satan: the United States of America.
Soon, sending money wasn’t enough. He had to fight. To fight a war, a general needed an army and an army needed land. A place of their own. Nigeria was too Western and infiltrated by the Great Satan. No, Nigeria was out, but there were other places in Africa where an army could operate with impunity, out of reach of any government.
He set his sights on The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country neither democratic nor a republic, and marched fighters into the forest. He had his army, and he had his land. He still controlled the African arms market from the dark heart of Africa, and his army grew rich on money and munitions. They were swollen with recruits within a year. He and his men would cleanse Africa from the inside out and push the Great Satan off their continent like their forefathers had in Somalia.
And then one day, like a fly landing on the very edge of his spider’s web of the black market, a request for a weapon had come down to him. A request like he’d never seen before.
Now for the first time, he was face-to-face with the buyers at a meeting site deep in the forest of northeastern Congo.
Majambu, his blood brother, the man he trusted most in the world and who had been with him on that fateful mission when they’d gone north and found God, passed a sealed bucket to the buyers.
Idrissa hadn’t taken any chances, not with Majambu or his fighters. He’d had the prisoners assemble the package, wrapping everything in plastic and taping the bucket closed. It sat waiting for a week.
The buyers glared. “You could have filled this with dirt. Open it!”
“We will not,” Idrissa said. His voice was like thunder, like boulders rolling downhill.
“With no proof of delivery, there is no payment.”
Idrissa stared. He could kill these men. Kill them and burn the bucket and forget any of this ever happened. But what the men promised in payment was enough to make him agree to this madness.
He slid his gaze to Majambu. Majambu shook his head. It was too dangerous.
Too dangerous for his people, yes. He wouldn’t risk his own men.
But they had prisoners. Captives. Boys learning to be soldiers. And women. One of them would work. “Bring a woman,” he rumbled.
Majambu disappeared, silently slipping through the bush back to their camp. A moment later, they heard a piercing scream. Moss-covered liana shivered over the creeping strangler fig and the fuchsia bromeliads blooming at the roots of the towering sapele trees. The sapele trunks soared to the sky, their canopies flaring higher than other trees, greedy to steal the golden sun. The roots were taller than a man and plunged in and out of the earth like wooden rivers, dotted with bromeliads like jewels scattered on black velvet.
A woman burst from between the trees and fell to her knees, sobbing as she clung to her torn shirt. “Please,” she begged, “please!” Majambu stalked silently out of the bush, watching her with his cold gaze.
“No one will touch you again, sister,” Idrissa said. “You have my word.”
Her lips quivered, tears shivering off her split bottom lip. “Thank—”
“But you must do something for us,” he said, cutting her off. “You must open that bucket and show it to those men.”
She stared at the buyers and then back at Idrissa. He saw her put it together, saw her recognize the trap. She couldn’t know what was in the bucket, but he watched her fear grow within her eyes until she trembled.
“If you do this, you will never be touched again. You have my word.”
She made her choice, and after a deep breath, she pulled herself forward, crawling across the dirt to the bucket. It was a magnet, everyone’s attention fixed on the dingy plastic.
He held his breath as she plucked at the silver tape, her swollen, fractured fingers struggling to peel the tape back. She winced, but kept picking at it until the tape came away in strips that clung to her fingers.
Idrissa motioned for the buyers to step back. They did, and one pulled out a scarf and put it over his mouth and nose.
She struggled with the lid, her broken fingers unable to wrench it off. She grit her teeth against the pain, but finally pulled the bucket against her side and used her body to pry it open.
The lid popped off and a liquid slush splashed from out and slapped across her face and chest.
