pistol Ali had used was a cleanskin and he’d disposed of it in a canal. But recently, word had come from a source in the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad that he’d been pinged – DNA evidence from the paper wrapping of the felafel roll he’d wolfed down while lying in wait in the bushes, and that he hadn’t been smart enough to take away with him. Their contact, a detective constable who received a monthly retainer along with free drinks and sexual services at the strip club (where some of the girls also worked as hookers), had warned that strenuous efforts were now being made to dig up further evidence implicating Ali. He’d also said it would be at least a month before detectives could put together enough material to charge him. Once that happened, he’d be a dead man walking. The Khaleds would get him long before a jury deliberated his case.
And so Ali had been ordered by his two older brothers to take a sojourn in the Middle East while the heat died down. Mehmet and Abdul had in mind the quiet village in southern Lebanon where they’d spent their very early years, and where they still had close relatives. Or Beirut, if Ali wanted some life in the fast lane. But Ali had flabbergasted his brothers when he said yes, he’d go to the Middle East – but his destination would be Syria.
Over the past year Ali had been associating with the Sydney disciples of a jihadist cleric called Sheikh Omar Halab who’d preached a few times at Lakemba Mosque before his extreme views got him banned from the lectern. A few members of the group had since joined the ranks of the 200-plus Australians who were now in the Middle East fighting for Islamic State.
Ali had been exchanging WhatsApp messages with one of his radicalised friends, Wassim Hariri, who was living in the northern Syrian rebel stronghold of Raqqa. Wassim had given Ali a contact in southern Turkey who’d help him get across the border.
But before Ali went off to fight the infidel, his older brothers were buying him a bit of life insurance. They’d organised this shooting trip so he could get some practice firing high calibre rifles at moving targets in desert terrain. Abdul, who had a clean police record and could therefore get a shooting licence, had purchased two sporting rifles. They weren’t automatic assault weapons, but the Remington Model Seven Stainless rifles fired .243 bullets the size of a man’s little finger with the stopping power to bring down a large animal – or a human. The family scion Mehmet had lent them his ute and they’d driven over the Blue Mountains, into the desert country beyond Broken Hill, waging war on the local wildlife along the way.
The guns clipped into a rack Abdul had built into the tray of the ute. Stepping out of the cabin after his smoke of meth, Ali went around to the back and got his rifle. It was a deadly-looking weapon with a black polymer stock, gleaming stainless steel barrel and large silver telescopic sight. He slung the gun over his shoulder by its black webbing strap.
‘Leave the gun here, brother,’ Abdul told him, ‘It might freak people out.’
Ali cursed – it was an Arabic phrase, bala‘a il a’air, which meant ‘cocksucker’ – and replaced the rifle. He took a torch and bottle of water from the cabin of the car.
‘I’ll flash the headlights on and off every ten minutes so you can find your way back,’ Abdul called after his brother’s retreating form. ‘You better hurry, there’s a storm on the way.’
‘Bala‘a il a’air!’ Ali shouted back. He lumbered off into the gloom, the torch beam picking out a path between the sparse patches of mulga.
Ali was one of the very small number of people on earth who could get away with calling his brother a cocksucker. In fact, probably the only other person who’d be able to do that was their elder brother Mehmet.
As Ali’s form disappeared into the gloom, Abdul got a bamboo mat from the back of the ute and laid it out over a patch of bare dirt, where there definitely wouldn’t be any Devil’s Head Thorns lurking. Then he started doing push ups. Three sets of twelve, with breaks of thirty seconds in between. This would help to ensure his pecs were in good form next time he flexed them on a Muscle Boys Afloat cruise.
Muscle Boys Afloat was a male stripper cruise that his cousin Ziad operated from a rundown old showboat on Sydney Harbour. On Saturday nights, Abdul would be a special guest. He wouldn’t be an official part of the show, but between acts he liked to impress the girls who flocked on board for their hen parties by taking his shirt off out on deck and flexing his pecs. First his left pec would ripple as though a pair of electrodes had been applied to it, then the right pec would spring into action, then the left again… It wasn’t exactly an act that would get him booked in Vegas, or anywhere else for that matter, but the girls liked it.
A psychiatrist might well have a field day delving into the mind of a man who liked to have women ogling his tits. And that same shrink would probably be very interested in the fact that, despite the pride Abdul took in his pecs, he suffered from a distinct degree of body dysmorphia when it came to his abs.
Abdul didn’t have a six-pack. His was a four-pack. Nature had cruelly decreed that the bottom set of glutus maximus protrusions remained hidden. Which looked fine… to everyone else in the world except Abdul. So when he flaunted his bare torso on board the cruises or on other occasions, Abdul would hold his lower arm in such a way that it obscured his midriff, or at least enough of it for a casual observer to assume he had a full six-pack. Usually he’d accomplish this by holding a stubby of beer in front of his abs. When the time came to sip the beer, he’d casually switch the bottle to his other hand and lift it to his lips while continuing to shield the stomach which was so unjustly two short of a six-pack. Recently he’d started exploring the notion of having a two-pack surgically implanted.
6 HEAD OF BEHEADING
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